Cyclic and non-cyclic small mammal populations : an artificial dichotomy

Much of recent research on small mammal population ecology is based on the dichotomy between cyclic and non-cyclic populations. One of the main methods to distinguish the two types of fluctuations, the s-index, is shown to have several technical weakness. We further demonstrate that the dichotomy is an artifical one, and argue that the adherence to the uniqueness of cyclic populations has had a strong hampering effect on the development of small mammal population research