Alan Turing, an English mathematician, is known for the Turing pattern or how patterns appear in nature. For the first time, ecologists have associated Turing's model with Australia's fairy circles.
Researchers from the University of Gottingen and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany worked with scientists from the University of Western Australia and Israel's Ben‐Gurion University of the Negev on a study published in the Journal of Ecology. The team analyzed the pattern of fairy circles commonly found in Western Australia and Namibia.
Fairy circles are spots of vegetation that form a specific pattern in drylands. The authors wrote that for decades, scientists had been fascinated "about such highly ordered distributions."
Vegetation that forms into these "spatially periodic plant patterns" include tiger bush, shrubs, and grass. Scientists have often associated fairy circles with long‐range water depletion or lack of groundwater.
Analyzing the Behavior of Fairy Circles
Combining spatial statistics, drone technology for an aerial view with the cameras SONY NEX‐7 and Tetracam Mini MCA‐6, field mapping, and data from a field-weather station, they categorized fairy circles into high-vitality or low-vitality vegetation. The unique gap pattern of vegetation has also increased in the past few years due to wildfires.
Their findings have linked the patterns to the Turing pattern theory. The same theory has been used to explain patterns in nature, such as tree stripes, spots on a leopard, patterns on the giant pufferfish.
Other patterns described by the pattern theory are cloud patterns in the sky and sand ripples in desserts. According to Turing's theory, patterns form as the result of two diffusible substances interacting.
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Survival Mechanism in Drylands
The interaction between the lack of water and survival in the drylands caused the grass to form into fairy circles. The round pattern creates a sort of barrier, some with a diameter of 13 feet, enabling the vegetation to maximize its water uptake.
Even as temperatures increase, the barrier cools the surface temperature to 77 degrees Fahrenheit. This enables the vegetation to germinate so that new grass can grow.
The grasses then become "ecosystem engineers" by modifying their environment to cope with harsh conditions in the desert. Dr. Stephan Getzin from the University of Gottingen said, "The intriguing thing is that the grasses are actively engineering their environment by forming symmetrically spaced gap patterns.
The vegetation benefits from the additional runoff water provided by the large fairy circles, and so keeps the arid ecosystem functional even in very harsh, dry conditions."
If the grass did not have the ecosystem engineering function, the desert area would most likely be just bare soil. The Turing pattern then seems to be nature's way of surviving despite a water shortage.
Combining empirical ecology and physics, shared the authors, may "lead to a deep understanding of multi‐scale feedbacks in complex ecological systems."
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