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JOURNAL OF PLANKTON RESEARCH | VOLUME 15 | NUMBER 6 | PAGES 603-617 | 1993
© Oxford University Press

research-article

Is there chaos in plankton dynamics?

Fortunato A. Ascioti1,2, Edward Beltrami3, T.O. Carroll4 and Creighton Wirick5

1Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Woods Hole, MA 02543, USA 2IMAAA CNR, Via S. Loja Tito Scalo (PZ) 85050, Italy 3Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and the Marine Sciences Research Center SUNY Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA 4Institute for Pattern Recognition and the Harriman School of Management SUNY Stony Brook, NY 11794 5Oceanographic Sciences Division, Brookhaven National Laboratory Upton, NY 11973, USA

Received on July 20, 1992; accepted on January 4, 1993 A controversial issue in ecosystem modeling is whether the irregular fluctuations that one observes in nature are due solely to random environmental factors or whether, at least partially, a deterministic mechanism is responsible for the unpredictable behavior. This second alternative is called deterministic chaos and the issue in this paper is to decide if actual plankton time series can vindicate the hypothesis of chaotic dynamics. The near-neighbor forecasting method is a recent technique for detecting determinism in a time series and we apply it to measurements of phytoplankton and zooplankton biomass obtained at a single station in the Middle Atlantic Bight. Although the results do not conclude the presence of chaos, they do give some support to the idea that deterministic non-linear trophic dynamics may account for at least some of the variability that is seen in the data, particularly in terms of inferring zooplankton oscillations from those of phytoplankton.


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