World Scientific Publishing, International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos in Applied Sciences and Engineering, 11(20), p. 3473-3485, 2010
DOI: 10.1142/s0218127410027829
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We present in this paper the first example of chaotic evolutionary dynamics in biology. We consider a Lotka–Volterra tritrophic food chain composed of a resource, its consumer, and a predator species, each characterized by a single adaptive phenotypic trait, and we show that for suitable modeling and parameter choices the evolutionary trajectories approach a strange attractor in the three-dimensional trait space. The study is performed through the bifurcation analysis of the so-called canonical equation of Adaptive Dynamics, the most appropriate modeling approach to long-term evolutionary dynamics.