Response to comment on "Stability via asynchrony in Drosophila metapopulations with low migration rates"

Abstract

Ranta and Kaitala find asynchrony in our experiment unexpected and suggest stochasticity as a possible causal mechanism using simulated two-patch metapopulations. However, their mechanism can yield either subpopulation synchrony or asynchrony. We extend their approach to a nine-patch system approximating our experiment and show that asynchrony is not only not unexpected but extremely likely in real metapopulations with low migration.