CHAOS - AN ECOLOGICAL REALITY

Deterministic chaos has been studied extensively in various fields. So me of the ideas emerging out of these studies have been put to novel a pplications. However, it is unknown whether natural ecological systems support chaotic dynamics. There is no concrete evidence which suggest s that ecosystem evolution is chaotic in certain situations. This is v ery intriguing because ecosystems do possess all the necessary qualifi cations to be able to support such a dynamical behavior. The present p aper attempts to answer the above question with the help of a few syst ems modeling different but very common ecological situations. A new me thodology for the analysis of a class of model ecological systems is p resented. Simulation experiments suggest that natural terrestrial syst ems are not suitable candidates where one should look for chaos. Addit ionally, our study also points out that the failure of attempts to obs erve chaos in natural populations might have resulted because biologic al interactions are not conducive for such a behavior to be supported. The cause of these failures may not be the poor data quality or demer its in the analysis techniques.