The Centre Cannot Hold?

Beginning in 1989, and continuing through 1997, biologist Reinhard Heerkloss of the University of Rostock in Germany took inventory of the microscopic life growing in a plastic cylinder of unfiltered Baltic Sea water which he kept growing in his lab. He kept the water temperature, salinity, aeration, and light constant over the eight years. What he discovered is challenging traditional ecological modeling expectations.

While populations of planktonic producers and consumers fluctuated through the years, the long-term fates of each species proved impossible to predict.

When the researchers looked just a few days into the future, they were able to make fairly accurate forecasts. But when they extended their predictions beyond 2 weeks, they rarely got it right. Long-term food-web dynamics were chaotic, and organism interactions led to unpredictable changes in the numbers of each species, with no one group staying on top for very long. The difference in predictability is akin to that between short-term and long-term weather forecasts.
ScienceNOW Daily News
13 February 2008

At least within marine planktonic communities, the concept of the "balance of nature" may not exist. While physicists may embrace chaos as a foundation of their field, Heerkloss' findings may not be warmly welcomed in biological circles and may require ecologists to rethink well established paradigms.

Benjamin Halpern of the University of California, Santa Barbara, thinks these findings also have a bearing on conservation, "If the result in this study is accurate, then efforts to manage species and communities will be quite challenging."