Spatial self-organisation in ecology: pretty patterns or robust reality?

Many seemingly plausible mathematical models of small-scale ecological interactions predict the self-organisation of dynamic, coherent and large scale spatial patterns (e.g. spirals). If true, such patterns would have important ecological and evolutionary consequences. For the most part, however, empirical studies have not corroborated their existence, suggesting erroneous dynamics in the models, shortcomings in empirical methodology, or both. Arguments for categorically dismissing self-organized patterns have been based on their assumed sensitivity to symmetry-breaking stochastic noise. However, many plausible mechanisms for generating patterns are robust to noise, and consequently broken symmetry is insufficient grounds for dismissing these self-organized patterns.