Advent of Extreme Events in Predator Populations

We study the dynamics of a ring of patches with vegetation-prey-predator populations, coupled through interactions of the Lotka-Volterra type. We find that the system yields aperiodic, recurrent and rare explosive bursts of predator density in a few isolated spatial patches from time to time. Furthe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2019-11
Main Authors: Sudhanshu Shekhar Chaurasia, Verma, Umesh Kumar, Sinha, Sudeshna
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biomass
Carnivores
Coupling
Extreme values
Nonlinear systems
Populations
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We study the dynamics of a ring of patches with vegetation-prey-predator populations, coupled through interactions of the Lotka-Volterra type. We find that the system yields aperiodic, recurrent and rare explosive bursts of predator density in a few isolated spatial patches from time to time. Further, the collective predator biomass also exhibits sudden uncorrelated occurrences of large deviations as the coupled system evolves. The maximum value of the predator population in a patch, as well as the maximum value of the predator biomass, increases with coupling strength. These trends are further corroborated by fits to Generalized Extreme Value distributions, where the location and scale factor of the distribution increases markedly with coupling strength, indicating the crucial role of coupling interactions in the generation of extreme events. These results indicate how occurrences of extremely large predator populations can emerge in coupled population dynamics, and in a more general context they suggest a generic class of deterministic nonlinear systems that can naturally exhibit extreme events.
ISSN:2331-8422