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For spatio-temporal chaos observed in numerical simulations of the complex Ginzburg–Landau equation (CGL) and in experiments on inclined-layer convection (ILC) we report numerical and experimental data on the statistics of defects and of defect loops. These loops consist of defect trajectories in space–time that are connected to each other through the pairwise annihilation or creation of the associated defects. While most such loops are small and contain only a few defects, the loop distribution functions decay only slowly with the quantities associated with the loop size, consistent with power-law behavior. For the CGL, two of the three power-law exponents are found to agree, within our computational precision, with those from previous investigations of a simple lattice model. In certain parameter regimes of the CGL and ILC, our results for the single-defect statistics show significant deviations from the previously reported findings that the defect dynamics are consistent with those of random walkers that are created with fixed probability and annihilated through random collisions. © 2004 American Institute of Physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]