I live in a small city in the US, where it’s grass everywhere. There’s lots of rabbits, but why aren’t there more? They eat grass, and there’s clearly more grass than they can eat at their current population size. There’s no significant predators to speak of, I don’t think. They breed legendarily quickly, there’s even an expression about it. So if food isn’t a constraint, predators aren’t a constraint, what is the constraint? I would think they should just increase population until we don’t have to cut our grass anymore.
In: Biology
Another contributing factor here is that rabbits can display some tendencies similar to [embryonic diapause](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959437X24000418) even though they don’t necessarily fall into this category:
> A ‘diapause-like’ state can also apparently be induced in nondiapause mammals (sheep and rabbit), but this has not been able to be replicated. Regardless, this suggests that at least some of the essential mechanisms that control embryo viability at this stage are conserved in all mammals.
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