Chaos by chance

2008/04/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Zoologia
• Ekologia

After eight years of study of a plankton community in the Baltic Sea, a group of researchers from the University of Amsterdam pointed out that population dynamics are chaotic, that is, there is no balance in nature.

The populations of the species that form any ecosystem have large fluctuations. Until now, these incidents were considered due to changes in the environment conditions. To check if this was the case, Herbeereta's team eliminated these changes in the environment, maintaining constant temperature, salinity, luminosity and ventilation for eight years.

These conditions also showed great ups and downs in the community under study. This means that the very competitiveness among species is what causes at times the increase of some and the decrease of others. Advanced mathematical techniques also showed that the plankton community dominated the chaos.

However, some scientists outside this group consider that it is not possible to generalize to all nature what has been seen in a community.