Distributed Delays Stabilize Ecological Feedback Systems

We consider the effect of distributed delays in predator-prey models and ecological food webs. Whereas the occurrence of delays in population dynamics is usually regarded a destabilizing factor leading to the extinction of species, we here demonstrate complementarily that delay distributions yield larger stability regimes than single delays. Food webs with distributed delays closely resemble nondelayed systems in terms of ecological stability measures. Thus, we state that dependence of dynamics on multiple instances in the past is an important, but so far underestimated, factor for stability in dynamical systems.