Waltz of the weevil

摘要

Waltzing Matilda, the bush ballad that became Australia's unofficial national anthem, relates the exploits of an out-of-control sheep shearer "camped by a billabong" (a small stagnant lake) in the Australian outback. On page 86 of this issue we read about the findings of an inspired group of theoretical ecologists and their models of out-of-control billabongs. Schooler et al. present a mathematical modelling study of an invasive plant species, the noxious weed Salvinia molesta, and its erratic large-scale outbreaks in four billabongs over a period of several decades. The authors' skilfully executed modelling is an imaginative combination of nonlinear dynamics, statistical inference and stochastic time-series analysis.