Including trait-based early warning signals helps predict population collapse.

As a population at carrying capacity can be considered to have gone through a critical transition when the realized non-linear growth rate of a population falls below one (and thus the ability of a system to respond to perturbations diminishes) 11 , in the above scenario a negative trend in the mean body size of a population (and consequently in growth rates) could be used as an alternative measure of whether a system is approaching a bifurcation.

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Rather, we argue that one would expect a consistently declining trend before collapse in the mean body size, and, potentially, an increasing trend in the variance of body size.

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