Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0143385712000223 How to cite this article: ZHENYANG LI and PAWEŁ GÓRA (2013). Instability of the isolated spectrum for W-shaped maps.Abstract. In this note we consider the W-shaped map W 0 = W s 1 ,s 2 with 1/s 1 + 1/s 2 = 1 and show that the eigenvalue 1 is not stable. We do this in a constructive way. For each perturbing map W a we show the existence of a 'second' eigenvalue λ a , such that λ a → 1 as a → 0, which proves instability of the isolated spectrum of W 0 . At the same time, the existence of second eigenvalues close to 1 causes the maps W a to behave in a metastable way. There are two almost-invariant sets, and the system spends long periods of consecutive iterations in each of them, with infrequent jumps from one to the other.