Controlling Populations of Immortals

A problem that fantasy writers have when faced with long-lived races, such as elves, is population control. A common method is low fertility and/or an extremely long maturity rate, but this would make it extremely difficult for the race to ever rebound if something went wrong.

So here are other ideas.


 * Breeding is controlled by government.


 * Large amounts of the species are periodically killed off, i.e. in battles, esp. for those located in war zones, or participating in a war.


 * Violent race that fights (and thus dies) a lot.


 * High death rate among infants.


 * Social/pheromone stimulation controls fertility: in an area dense with pheromones or heavily populated, a female is unlikely to come into estrus. If she is removed from her own kind, she will come into her breeding cycle.


 * There's nothing wrong with their fertility; they just have a low sex drive.


 * They have perfectly normal fertility and sex drive, but they are advanced enough for widespread acceptance of birth control.
 * They require very specific conditions to breed.


 * They are robots/androids and incapable of breeding.


 * After they reproduce, they die.


 * There are far more males than females.


 * The extreme majority of the species is homosexual.


 * The government/population employs mass, artificial population control (in other words, mass executions) to keep numbers low.

Resources

 * Original Writerium Article