ABSTRACT

In Chapter 2, we discussed the modeling of systems from natural science. Many models from natural science or ecological systems admit chaotic solutions, but no field evidence has ever been found. Since the pioneering work of Sir Robert May [57−59], deterministic chaos has been studied in models by many authors theoretically [3,34,61,77,95,102,103,107,110], in the laboratory [8,22,40], and in the field [17,30,99,100]. Although chaos was observed by many authors in the models they had considered, it was not observed either in the laboratory studies [10,11] or from the field studies. A number of authors reported the existence of chaos in an appreciable range of a critical parameter of the system [2,34,41,43,45,80,104,105,107,110,111,116,117]. Attempts were also made to examine if the chaotic dynamics is robust with respect to changes in system parameters in a 2D space. If chaos exists in a sufficiently large area in a suitably chosen 2D parameter space, then it may be possible to observe chaos in at least in the laboratory. But, there is no confirmed example of dynamical chaos in an ecological system to date. This lack of evidence is puzzling, as experimental evidence [8] suggests that chaotic dynamics may be possible in real biological populations. Many authors [4,25,93,96] argued that populations evolve away from chaotic dynamics and this could explain the scarcity of evidence in favor of chaos. The Cornell group’s experiments carried out so far suggest that this may not be true [9]. The studies of an interdisciplinary team of Cushing et al. [10] suggested that complex dynamics in ecological data could be the result of some simple rules.