Quenching of Chaos in externally driven metacommunities

Abstract Population dynamics of different species across food web models of diverse spatial scales have been extensively investigated over the past three decades. Chaotic fluctuations in species populations are generally associated with increased extinction risk due to frequent periods of low species density leading to cascading effects. The existence of a food web where the cohabiting species population oscillates chaotically has been largely attributed to chaos control or death of chaos, mediated either by internal mechanisms, such as the food web favoring parameter values that keep the species population out of the chaotic region, or external mechanisms like environmental forcing. Yet, this picture is not complete, as food webs do not exist in isolation, but are generally connected to each other through dispersal of species, forming a metacommunity. A metacommunity of food webs whose dynamics is that of chaotic attractors can only persist through control and particularly the the quenching of chaos. We claim that habitat heterogeneity in such a metacommunity fulfills this purpose. We address this question by analyzing the dynamics of a drive-response metacommunity composed of five chaotic food webs, each located in a distinct patch. Each patch contains an inherently chaotic tritrophic food web, with habitat heterogeneity present among patches. The first patch functions as the drive, exerting external influence on the dynamics of the remaining four response patches. Our results establish that in a drive-response metacommunity, strong influence from the drive quenches dynamical chaos in both drive and response patches, often leading to steady states. This phenomenon is observed in two distinct metacommunity network structures. The heterogeneity of the response systems (food web models) and the dissimilarity between drive and response systems are found to play significant roles in suppressing chaotic population dynamics. These findings strongly imply that the persistence of such inherently chaotic metacommunities may result from the quenching of chaos through the interplay of chaos, habitat heterogeneity, and to some degree network structure shaped by dispersal. Furthermore, we illustrate that these metacommunities are also susceptible to extinction due to dispersal-induced synchronization. Accordingly, this study also investigates dispersal-induced complete synchronization among the constituent patches.