Abstract
We study how predator behavior influences community dynamics of predatorprey systems. It turns out that predator behavior plays a dominant role in community dynamics. The hybrid model studied in this paper reveals that period-doubling and period-doubling reversals can generate short-term recurrent chaos (STRC), which mimics chaotic dynamics observed in natural populations. STRC manifests itself when deterministic changes in a system parameter interrupt chaotic behavior at unpredictable intervals. Numerical results reinforce an earlier suggestion that period-doubling reversals could control chaotic dynamics in ecological models. In ecological terms, the prey and intermediate predator populations may go to extinction in the event of a catastrophe. The top predator is always a survivor. In contrast to this, this is not the case when the constituent populations are interacting through Holling type II functional response. Even this top predator can go to extinction in the event of such catastrophes.
Highlights
Understanding ecosystem’s dynamics is one of the most challenging tasks
It is clear from these figures that basin boundaries of the chaotic attractor are fractal which show the dynamical complexities of the hybrid model system (3)
The chaotic behavior is interrupted by non-chaotic dynamics at unpredictable intervals and we thought that a special kind of bifurcation process was responsible for short-term recurrent chaos (STRC) [10]
Summary
Understanding ecosystem’s dynamics is one of the most challenging tasks. The biotic part of the ecosystem comprises living entities known as species. The population dynamic models are assembled by combining functional and numerical responses of predators in a suitably chosen scheme It is expected that natural food chains could be better represented by models, which incorporate both Holling type II and CM functional responses The latter assumes that the per capita feeding rate of the predators is a function of predator interference effects. Upadhyay and Rai [5] proposed and studied a hybrid food chain model to understand why deterministic chaos is rarely observed in natural populations. These models were designed by combining two formulations of predator-prey dynamics: Volterra and Leslie–Gower schemes. It would be beneficial if this approach, based on bifurcations of higher co-dimension as indicators of chaos, could be extended to food web architectures
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