Wed, 01/27/2021
LAWRENCE For at least a century, ecologists have wondered at the tendency for populations of different species to cycle up and down in steady, rhythmic patterns.
“These cycles can be really exaggerated really huge booms and huge busts and quite regular,” said Daniel Reuman, professor of ecology & evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas and senior scientist at the Kansas Biological Survey. “It attracted people’s attention because it was kind of mysterious. Why would such a big thing be happening?”
A second observation in animal populations might be even harder to fathom: Far-flung communities of species, sometimes separated by hundreds of miles, often fluctuate in synchrony with one another an effect known as “spatial synchrony.”