The ghost of ecology in chaos, combining intransitive and higher order effects

Abstract: Historically, musings about the structure of ecological communities has revolved around the structure of pairwise interactions, competition, predation, mutualism, etc. . . Recently a growing literature acknowledges that the baseline assumption that the pair of species is not necessarily the metaphorical molecule of community ecology, and that certain structures containing three or more species may not be usefully divisible into pairwise components. Two examples are intransitive competition (species A dominates species B dominates species C dominates species A), and nonlinear higher-order effects. While these two processes have been discussed extensively, the explicit analysis of how the two of them behave when simultaneously part of the same dynamic system has not yet appeared in the literature. A concrete situation exists on coffee farms in Puerto Rico in which three ant species, at least on some farms, form an intransitive competitive triplet, and that triplet is strongly influenced, nonlinearly, by a fly parasitoid that modifies the competitive ability of one of the species in the triplet. Using this arrangement as a template we explore the dynamical consequences with a simple ODE model. Results are complicated and include include alternative periodic and chaotic attractors. The qualitative structures of those complications, however, may be retrieved easily from a reflection on the basic natural history of the system.