ArticleNature2009
Phase-locking and environmental fluctuations generate synchrony in a predator-prey community.
Article in Nature, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 149 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Phenology-informed decline risk of estuarine fishes and their prey suggests potential for future trophic mismatches.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2025Article
- Insights Into Spatial Synchrony Enabled by Long-Term Data.Ecology letters · 2025Review
- Assessing the spatial scale of synchrony in forest tree population dynamics.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
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- From pattern to process? Dual travelling waves, with contrasting propagation speeds, best describe a self-organised spatio-temporal pattern in population growth of a cyclic rodent.Ecology letters · 2022Article
- Dynamical Ising model of spatially coupled ecological oscillators.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Hidden similarities in the dynamics of a weakly synchronous marine metapopulation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Population spatial synchrony enhanced by periodicity and low detuning with environmental forcing.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Metapopulation dynamics in a changing climate: Increasing spatial synchrony in weather conditions drives metapopulation synchrony of a butterfly inhabiting a fragmented landscape.Global change biology · 2018Article
- Spatial and temporal variation in the range-wide cyclic dynamics of greater sage-grouse.Oecologia · 2017Article
- Scale-dependent portfolio effects explain growth inflation and volatility reduction in landscape demography.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Center of mass in complex networks.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Using multivariate cross correlations, Granger causality and graphical models to quantify spatiotemporal synchronization and causality between pest populations.BMC ecology · 2016Article
- Article
- Light-driven synchrony of Prochlorococcus growth and mortality in the subtropical Pacific gyre.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
- Emergent long-range synchronization of oscillating ecological populations without external forcing described by Ising universality.Nature communications · 2015Article
- Species survival emerge from rare events of individual migration.Scientific reports · 2015Article
- Article
- Dispersal and noise: various modes of synchrony in ecological oscillators.Journal of mathematical biology · 2013Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Spatially synchronized fluctuations in system state are common in physical and biological systems ranging from individual atoms to species as diverse as viruses, insects and mammals. Although the causal factors are well known for many synchronized phenomena, several processes concurrently have an impact on spatial synchrony of species, making their separate effects and interactions difficult to quantify. Here we develop a general stochastic model of predator-prey spatial dynamics to predict the outcome of a laboratory microcosm experiment testing for interactions among all known synchronizing factors: (1) dispersal of individuals between populations; (2) spatially synchronous fluctuations in exogenous environmental factors (the Moran effect); and (3) interactions with other species (for example, predators) that are themselves spatially synchronized. The Moran effect synchronized populations of the ciliate protist Tetrahymena pyriformis; however, dispersal only synchronized prey populations in the presence of the predator Euplotes patella. Both model and data indicate that synchrony depends on cyclic dynamics generated by the predator. Dispersal, but not the Moran effect, 'phase-locks' cycles, which otherwise become 'decoherent' and drift out of phase. In the absence of cycles, phase-locking is not possible and the synchronizing effect of dispersal is negligible. Interspecific interactions determine population synchrony, not by providing an additional source of synchronized fluctuations, but by altering population dynamics and thereby enhancing the action of dispersal. Our results are robust to wide variation in model parameters representative of many natural predator-prey or host-pathogen systems. This explains why cyclic systems provide many of the most dramatic examples of spatial synchrony in nature.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.