As you finish up your March Madness bracket, keep in mind the laws of the jungle. It turns out win-loss records in basketball, and population statistics in ecology, look almost exactly alike.

“Just like there are a few dominant species in a jungle, there are a few dominant teams in college basketball,” said Yale ecologist Robert Warren, lead author of a new study in the journal PLoS One. “And all the rest do OK.”

Warren compared basketball stats and ecology stats to get a new look at a longstanding puzzle in ecology. For some reason, environments from the tropics to the tundra seem to have the same distribution of species. Most have a few species with a lot of members, and a lot of species with very few members.

Recently, some ecologists have tried to use statistical analysis to find one overarching explanation for why populations shake out the way they do. The standard idea for the last 150 years was Darwin’s survival of the fittest: The most common creatures were the ones who survived, ate and reproduced. But a new idea, called neutral theory, suggests that “while species might be different, it all comes out in the wash,” Warren said. As far as population statistics are concerned, competition between species doesn’t matter.

The theory bothered Warren, a lifelong college basketball fan. “If that were true, then there’s no difference between Duke and Arkansas State,” he said. It could be that similar statistical patterns naturally show up in a large enough data set, whether the data is related to ecology or not.

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