nucleation

LIT-1236: Phase Transition to Chaos in Complex Ecosystems with Nonreciprocal Species-Resource Interactions

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Properties5
StatusActive — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1366) in full, from arXiv v2 (the letter and its supplement); worth reading as the result that in MacArthur's consumer–resource model with benefits and impacts correlated by ρ the cavity fixed point loses stability at ρ*² = surviving species over non-depleted resources, a boundary the symmetric model never reaches (THEORY-1162). Read it knowing that the boundary rests on a replica-symmetric ansatz, that the chaos beyond it is shown by simulation at a few parameter points, and that the letter's fast-resource formula carries a stray R_α.
Version2
Tagsecology, complex-systems
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1366 — Blumenthal, Rocks and Mehta — Phase transition to chaos with nonreciprocal species-resource interactions
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-1162 — In a consumer-resource model whose species-resource benefits and impacts have correlation rho, the replica-symmetric cavity fixed point loses stability where rho squared equals surviving species over non-depleted resources

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Blumenthal, E., Rocks, J. W. & Mehta, P. (2024). Phase Transition to Chaos in Complex Ecosystems with Nonreciprocal Species-Resource Interactions. Physical Review Letters 132(12): 127401. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.127401. arXiv:2308.15757.

Read in full on 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1366). One account was drawn from it: THEORY-1162.

Why this is here

The synthesis the owner relayed on 2026-10-18, connecting the record’s distributed-agency line to statistical feature learning and ecological coexistence theory, recommended it for reading. On the synthesis’s reading, it marks where the optimization picture of the papers filed with it fails: with non-reciprocal interactions the dynamics need not minimize any objective, and a differentiated community can give way to chaos. The synthesis took this as the limit of reading distributed agency as optimization. Bears on QUESTION-083.

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