Berlin 2012 – scientific programme
Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help
BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 5: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems II (with DY)
BP 5.3: Talk
Monday, March 26, 2012, 15:30–15:45, H 1058
Meso-scale symmetries explain dynamical equivalence of food webs — •Helge Aufderheide1,2, Lars Rudolf2, and Thilo Gross2 — 1MPI für Physik komplexer Systeme, Dresden — 2University of Bristol, Bristol
In complex networks much of the dynamics emerges from the complex interactions between its constituents. However, connecting the interaction topology with the final dynamics remains a hard and largely unsolved problem. Inspired by a recent result on the dynamical equivalence of food webs differing only by local symmetries in their trophic graph, we investigate the effects of such symmetries on the dynamics of food webs. Using generalized modeling to establish the food web Jacobian matrix near the steady states we can study entire classes of food web models instead of fixing specific functional dependencies between the interacting species. Thereby we find that food webs differing by local symmetries indeed carry identical dynamics up to effects localized inside the symmetric part. On one hand this result for equivalent dynamics provides a link between the topology and the dynamical properties of a food web. On the other hand the formalism should be applicable to identify classes of equivalent dynamics hidden to empirical observation in more complicated systems.