A stochastic spatial model for the sterile insect control strategy

Abstract

In the system we study, 1’s and 0’s represent occupied and vacant sites in the contact process with births at rate λ and deaths at rate 1. −1’s are sterile individuals that do not reproduce but appear spontaneously on vacant sites at rate α and die at rate θα. We show that the system (which is attractive but has no dual) dies out at the critical value and has a nontrivial stationary distribution when it is supercritical. Our most interesting results concern the asymptotics when α→0. In this regime the process resembles the contact process in a random environment.