Coupling-induced oscillations in two intrinsically quiescent populations

A model of two consumer-resource systems linked by interspecific interference competition of consumers is considered. The basic assumption of the model is that the dynamics of the resource is much slower than that of the consumer. In the absence of interaction each consumer-resource pair has a unique stable steady state which is completely nonoscillatory. When weakly coupled, the consumer-resource pairs are shown to exhibit sustained low-frequency synchronous antiphase relaxation oscillations.