For the past decade, ecologist Stephan Munch has been convinced that chaos must be more common in ecological systems than the prevailing wisdom suggests. Chaos, which is marked by an extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, emerges in complex nonlinear systems (see the article by Adilson Motter and David Campbell, Physics Today, May 2013, page 27). Ecosystems teeming with interacting species and influenced by the weather—itself chaotic!—seem to be prime candidates. But when Munch mentioned the possibility of chaotic ecological behavior to his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, one response was simply, “Didn’t we disprove that in the ’90s?”
The 1990s had indeed seen numerous studies reporting that ecological chaos was rare. Chaos was first introduced to the field two decades earlier in simple theoretical models from Robert May, John Beddington, and their colleagues. The expectation was that chaos could explain the observed fluctuations in animal...
