MATHEMATICAL STUDY OF A PEST CONTROL MODEL INCORPORATING STERILE INSECT TECHNIQUE

Abstract

AbstractThe menace of insect pests is a topic of major concern throughout the world. Chemical pesticides are conventionally used to control these insect pests. However, the adverse effects of these synthetic pesticides, such as high toxicity from residues in food, contamination of water and the environment resulting in human health hazard and resistance of the pest to the pesticides have necessitated development of some nonconventional approaches of biological pest control.In this research, we have focused on a mathematical model of biological pest control using the sterile insect release technique. Unlike most of the existing modeling studies in this field that mainly deal with the pest population only, we have incorporated the crop population as a distinct dynamical equation together with the fertile and sterile insect pests. Local stability analysis is performed around the crop and fertile insect free axial equilibrium, the fertile‐insect‐free boundary equilibrium, the crop‐free boundary equilibrium and the equilibrium point of coexistence. From the study we have derived a number of thresholds for the SIRR (the main parameter for our study) that cause existence and or extinction of the crop population as well as the fertile insect pests. A global study of the model system using comparison arguments revealed existence of a global attractor for the system. Numerical simulations are done to support and augment analytical results.