| Abstract: | A deterministic predator-prey model describing populations as collections of autonomous individuals was used to investigate population dynamics as an emergent property of individual behaviors and actions in a simulated environment. The model's behavior was clearly chaotic for both the two species interaction and for the prey population alone. Furthermore, estimated parameters from a simple difference equation model fitted to the single-species simulation were nowhere near the chaotic region for the equation. Findings indicate that chaos may very well be characteristic of biological populations despite the findings of several empirical studies in the past, and that chaotic models can be constructed from direct observation of, and experimentation with, biological populations by focusing on individuals and their behaviors, rather than on population parameters. |
