Analysis of chaotic behaviour in the population dynamics.

Abstract

Recently, we have shown that the Penna bitstring model for population senescence can be used to model cyclic or chaotic behaviours in population dynamics. In this paper, we analyse the attractor of the dynamics, through the calculation of the Lyapunov exponents. We obtained that the dynamics is characterized by the existence of some small exponents, which we relate to the existence of homeochaos, needed for the generation of stability and diversity in living systems.