By the early '90s, ecologists had amassed enough time-series data sets to test their ideas. The chaos didn't seem to be there Only about 10 percent of the population seemed to change chaotically. By the mid- 1990s, theories of chaos were no longer used in science.
The new results show that the older work missed a place where chaos was hiding. The population size of one species was used to detect chaos. They didn't consider the changes in real-world factors that might affect populations. They didn't capture why the populations changed, but how they changed.
A professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the study, said that Rogers and Munch looked forchaos in a more sensible way. They analyzed 172 time series of different organisms' populations as models with as many as six dimensions rather than just one and left room for the influence of environmental factors. They could look at the one-dimensional representation of the population shifts to see if chaotic patterns were present. It is possible that more rain is linked to population increases or decreases, but only after a few years.
The signatures of chaotic interactions were found in the population data for about 34% of the species. The population changes for the species did not seem chaotic at first, but the relationship of the numbers to underlying factors was more important. Whatever environmental factors were responsible for the chaos, their fingerprints were on the data.
The inverse relationship between body size and population dynamics was discovered by the researchers. Small organisms that breed more often are also more affected by outside variables. Populations of diatoms with generations of around 15 hours show more chaos than packs of wolves.
That doesn't mean that wolves are stable. There is a chance that we are not seeing chaos because we don't have enough data to see it. He and Rogers think that because of the constraints of their data, their models might underestimate how much chaos is present.
New results may be important for the preservation of the environment. Predicting toxic algal blooms could be done better by improved models with the right element of chaos. It is possible to meaningfully predict population size by considering chaos. He thinks that the issue should be in people's minds.
He and King don't want to place too much faith in these models. King said that the classical idea of chaos is a stationary one. The assumption is that chaotic fluctuations are a departure from the norm. Climate change is making most real-world ecosystems unstable in the short term. Scientists will have to be aware of this baseline even though they take many dimensions into account.
Chaos is an important step in the right direction. "I think it's really exciting," said the man. It doesn't jive with the way we think about ecology.
The original story was originally published in the journal of the Simons Foundation, an editorially independent publication that covers research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
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