The work described by the Times article is part of a larger U.S. GLOBEC
project to understand the population dynamics of organisms with pelagic
larvae. The overall aim has been to combine the mechanism of larval
movement and settling, as affected by the California Current, with
dynamics of populations distributed along the Pacific coast. The
ultimate goal is to understand the population dynamics of species such
as the Dungeness crab and sea urchin in space and time. Thus our
modeling efforts have focused on two different time scales: the scale of
a few months corresponding to larval movement within a given year, and
the time scale of years (or many years) corresponding to population
dynamics, with larval movement, i.e., redistribution, as an input.
In our attempts to understand population dynamics over the scale of many
years, we have uncovered behavior of unforeseen complexity, which will
change our view of the dynamics of species distributed along coastlines,
as described in the accompanying reprinted news article. We strongly
believe that the more descriptive modeling approaches we have used are
absolutely necessary within the context of a program aimed at
understanding specific systems such as the California current--the
uncovering of general principles is needed to understand specific models
of complex systems.--Alan Hastings, University of California, Davis, CA.