The carrying capacity is the maximum population of a particular group that may be sustained in a region. Logistic growth is when the growth factor is proportional to the population itself and proportional to the difference between the population and the carrying capacity . You can therefore write logistic growth as a separable differential equation. The differential equation is:
The general solution is given by the formula:
If you are asked to solve the integral, this equation is useful:
Example 1
The number of bacteria in a polluted drinking water reservoir was originally 800. In the first hour afterwards, the number of bacteria increased by 320. Assume that the number of bacteria follows a model of logistic growth and that the carrying capacity is 7500.
Let be the number of bacteria after hours. Find , determine the growth model and find how many bacteria there were after and hours.
From the text you see that , , . You find by entering the values into the equation and solving for :
You can now enter straight into the differential equation and solve this to find the growth model:
Solve the differential equation by entering into the formula:
You can now find the number of bacteria for and :
The number of bacteria after 5 and 13 hours is and respectively.