Quenching of Chaos in externally driven metacommunities

The chaotic population dynamics of various natural ecosystems with widely varying spatial scales has been extensively investigated in the last three decades. Chaotic fluctuations in population, barring a very few specific conditions, have generally been established to be more prone to extinction through cascading effects, environmental noise, and regular occurrence of low species density. Thus, chaotic population dynamics has been largely associated with low persistence in ecosystems. Contrastingly, ecosystems with steady-state dynamics have been established to be extremely stable. Nevertheless, the continnued existence of chaotic ecosystems have been suggested to be a result of internal and external control of chaos engineered by either the ecosystems themselves, or some external factor. However, the question of chaos control, specifically, the quenching of chaos in metacommunities arising due to internal habitat heterogeneity has not been investigated. In this study, we analyze the dynamics of a metacommunity of ecosystems, where one patch is the drive, and the other patches are responses. Each patch consists of an inherently chaotic tritrophic food web, with habitat heterogeneity among themselves. We report that in a drive-response metacommunity, dynamical chaos in both drive and response patches is quenched under a strong influence of the drive, subsequently leading to steady states in most cases. We report the occurrence of this phenomenon for 2 metacommunity network structures. We discover that the heterogeneity of the response systems and the dissimilarity of the drive and response systems play a major role in quenching the chaos. Thus, it is extremely possible that the existence of an inherently chaotic metacommunity is strongly an interplay of chaos, habitat heterogeneity, and the structure of the network created by dispersal. Notably, metacommunities consisting of inherent chaotic patches also face the risk of extinction due to dispersal-induced synchronization. Therefore, we have investigated dispersal-induced complete, synchronization between the constituent patches of these drive-response metacommunity.