Global attractors and extinction dynamics of cyclically competing species

Transitions to absorbing states are of fundamental importance in nonequilibrium physics as well as ecology. In ecology, absorbing states correspond to the extinction of species. We here study the spatial population dynamics of three cyclically interacting species. The interaction scheme comprises both direct competition between species as in the cyclic Lotka-Volterra model, and separated selection and reproduction processes as in the May-Leonard model. We show that the dynamic processes leading to the transient maintenance of biodiversity are closely linked to attractors of the nonlinear dynamics for the overall species' concentrations. The characteristics of these global attractors change qualitatively at certain threshold values of the mobility and depend on the relative strength of the different types of competition between species. They give information about the scaling of extinction times with the system size and thereby the stability of biodiversity. We define an effective free energy as the negative logarithm of the probability to find the system in a specific global state before reaching one of the absorbing states. The global attractors then correspond to minima of this effective energy landscape and determine the most probable values for the species' global concentrations. As in equilibrium thermodynamics, qualitative changes in the effective free energy landscape indicate and characterize the underlying nonequilibrium phase transitions. We provide the complete phase diagrams for the population dynamics and give a comprehensive analysis of the spatio-temporal dynamics and routes to extinction in the respective phases

Permanence and almost periodic solution of a multispecies Lotka-Volterra mutualism system with time varying delays on time scales

In this paper, we consider the almost periodic dynamics of a multispecies Lotka-Volterra mutualism system with time varying delays on time scales. By establishing some dynamic inequalities on time scales, a permanence result for the model is obtained. Furthermore, by means of the almost periodic functional hull theory on time scales and Lyapunov functional, some criteria are obtained for the existence, uniqueness and global attractivity of almost periodic solutions of the model. Our results complement and extend some scientific work in recent years. Finally, an example is given to illustrate the main results.Comment: 31page

Field-theoretic methods

Many complex systems are characterized by intriguing spatio-temporal structures. Their mathematical description relies on the analysis of appropriate correlation functions. Functional integral techniques provide a unifying formalism that facilitates the computation of such correlation functions and moments, and furthermore allows a systematic development of perturbation expansions and other useful approximative schemes. It is explained how nonlinear stochastic processes may be mapped onto exponential probability distributions, whose weights are determined by continuum field theory actions. Such mappings are madeexplicit for (1) stochastic interacting particle systems whose kinetics is defined through a microscopic master equation; and (2) nonlinear Langevin stochastic differential equations which provide a mesoscopic description wherein a separation of time scales between the relevant degrees of freedom and background statistical noise is assumed. Several well-studied examples are introduced to illustrate the general methodology.Comment: Article for the Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science, B. Meyers (Ed.), Springer-Verlag Berlin, 200

The Jungle Universe

In this paper, we exploit the fact that the dynamics of homogeneous and isotropic Friedmann-Lemaitre universes is a special case of generalized Lotka-Volterra system where the competitive species are the barotropic fluids filling the Universe. Without coupling between those fluids, Lotka-Volterra formulation offers a pedagogical and simple way to interpret usual Friedmann-Lemaitre cosmological dynamics. A natural and physical coupling between cosmological fluids is proposed which preserve the structure of the dynamical equations. Using the standard tools of Lotka-Volterra dynamics, we obtain the general Lyapunov function of the system when one of the fluids is coupled to dark energy. This provides in a rigorous form a generic asymptotic behavior for cosmic expansion in presence of coupled species, beyond the standard de Sitter, Einstein-de Sitter and Milne cosmologies. Finally, we conjecture that chaos can appear for at least four interacting fluids.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figure

Influence of local carrying capacity restrictions on stochastic predator-prey models

We study a stochastic lattice predator-prey system by means of Monte Carlo simulations that do not impose any restrictions on the number of particles per site, and discuss the similarities and differences of our results with those obtained for site-restricted model variants. In accord with the classic Lotka-Volterra mean-field description, both species always coexist in two dimensions. Yet competing activity fronts generate complex, correlated spatio-temporal structures. As a consequence, finite systems display transient erratic population oscillations with characteristic frequencies that are renormalized by fluctuations. For large reaction rates, when the processes are rendered more local, these oscillations are suppressed. In contrast with site-restricted predator-prey model, we observe species coexistence also in one dimension. In addition, we report results on the steady-state prey age distribution.Comment: Latex, IOP style, 17 pages, 9 figures included, related movies available at http://www.phys.vt.edu/~tauber/PredatorPrey/movies