Additional Food Causes Predators to Explode — Unless the Predators Compete

Abstract

The literature posits that an introduced predator population is able to drive its target pest population to extinction, if supplemented with high quality additional food of sufficient quantity. We show this approach actually leads to infinite time blow-up of the predator population, so is unpragmatic as a pest management strategy. We propose an alternate model in which the additional food induces predator competition. Analysis of this model indicates that depending on the competition parameter [Formula: see text], one can have global stability of the pest-free state, bistability dynamics, or up to three interior equilibria. As [Formula: see text] and the additional food quantity [Formula: see text] are varied standard codimension one and codimension two bifurcations are observed. We also use structural symmetries to construct several nonstandard bifurcations such as saddle-node-transcritical bifurcation (SNTC) in codimension two and a cusp-transcritical bifurcation (CPTC), also in codimension two. We further use symmetry to construct a novel pitchfork-transcritical bifurcation (PTC) in codimension two, thus explicitly characterizing a new organizing center of the model. Our findings indicate that increasing additional food in predator–pest models can hinder bio-control, contrarily to some of the literature. However, additional food that also induces predator competition, leads to rich dynamics and enhances bio-control.