I think you nailed it. This is a good example of the adaptive cycle that's used to explain behavior in complex adaptive systems of various kinds. The cycle goe

I think you nailed it. This is a good example of the adaptive cycle that's used to explain behavior in complex adaptive systems of various kinds. The cycle goes through up to four phases: rapid growth, conservation, release, and reorganization. Rapid growth happens when a relatively unexploited resource is abundant (usually after a release/reorganization) and there isn't much competition. This is like a bare field - weeds move in quickly to take up unused space. Gradually, competition heats up as more things get in on the action. This is where optimization starts to become important, because the ones that do a better job with what's available start to come out on top, at the expense of the less-competitive ones. Late in the process, you're in the conservation phase, where it's hard to change the entrenched winners because they have all of the resources locked up (can be money, nutrients, or whatever). In the field analogy, the bigger weeds shade out the smaller ones, until eventually you have large trees taking up most of the available resources. This phase is the longest-lasting of the four in general. The system at this point is highly optimized and dependent on the winners of the conservation phase. At some point, these few hub elements get hit by a disturbance that shakes them up a bit, and the repercussions spread throughout the whole system. If it's a big enough disturbance, the whole system can fall apart due to the loss of the hubs. This is the release (so-called because the stuff that was locked up by the entrenched players becomes available again). In the field example, this might be a blight that knocks out the climax tree species, opening tons of space for new competitors and releasing the accumulated biomass in the trees for reuse. At this point, it's a free-for-all to see who can get a toehold first in the new rich environment, and a brief period of reorganization ensues while that's being sorted out. In the field example, this is where all of the dormant weed and tree seeds that have been waiting in the soil sprout at the same time. This quickly transitions into rapid growth again, and the whole thing repeats. It's also an instance of self-organized criticality, where a system tends to evolve toward a critical state (i.e. local disturbances can have global implications). There are ways to manage this cycle to some extent when you're aware of it - primary among them is to deliberately introduce disturbances to shake up the formation of the conservation phase and loosen the connections that have built up. Basically, you introduce more randomness into the works in order to keep things from becoming overly optimized (or highly correlated, in the language of self-organized criticality).