Article
The importance of transients’ dynamics in spatially extended populations
Autor
Saravia, Leonardo
Ruxton, Graeme
Coviella, Carlos E.
Institución
Resumen
Recent theoretical works on the dynamics of metapopulations have highlighted the existence of very long
transients (supertransients) with abrupt changes in behaviour which occur following perturbation of the
system away from its attractor. If this phenomenon is common in natural systems, populations that do
not oscillate can begin to £uctuate wildly without any change in the environmental conditions. However,
the frequency of occurrence of supertransients is currently poorly understood even in model systems.
Here we explore their occurrence in metapopulation models which relax the important assumption of
global synchrony of events implicit in all the coupled map lattice models for which supertransients have
so far been demonstrated. We ¢nd supertransients in all the models but always only for a very restricted
range of parameter combinations. However, we also report for the ¢rst time another type of longer-lived
transient (mesotransients) that occurs on shorter time-scales than supertransients and is found for a
much wider set of conditions.We argue that these medium-term changes in the dynamics of populations
can be of more ecological relevance than the long-term changes of supertransients.