Enhancing the stability of stochastic populations via non-demographic noise

In the usual setting non-demographic noise, emanating, e.g., from environmental variability, is manifested by time-varying reaction rates. In this work we investigate a different type of non-demographic noise in the form of uncertainty in the reaction step-size, and demonstrate that this type of noise can have a dramatic effect on the stability of self-regulating populations. By employing the usual reaction scheme mA->kA, but allowing, e.g., the product number k to be a-priori unknown and sampled from a given distribution, we show that such non-demographic noise can greatly increase the population's stability compared to the case of fixed k. Our analysis is tested against numerical simulations, and by using empirical data of different species, we argue that certain distributions may be more evolutionary beneficial than others.