Population dynamics of entangled species

The laws of physics enter the doctrine of population dynamics through various interactions whereby energy and matter, or more broadly, information are exchanged between different species and between species and their natural environment. The dynamics then emerge as a continual process involving many such causal interactions. Quantum physics, on the other hand, shows that the coordination between different processes must obey certain rules. We hypothetically ask: Can this game of species benefit from unique features of quantum mechanics such as entanglement and nonlocality? Here we extend quantum game theory to analyze this question and demonstrate that in certain models describing ecological systems where several predators feed on the same prey, the strength of quantum entanglement between the various species has a profound effect on the asymptotic behavior of the system. For example, if there are sufficiently many predator species who are all equally correlated with their prey, they are all driven to extinction. These results were derived in two ways: by analyzing the asymptotic dynamics of the system, and also by modeling the system as a quantum correlation network, which enabled us to apply methods from network theory in the above scenarios. Several generalizations and applications are discussed.