Role of Allee effect in prey and hunting cooperation in a generalist predator

Abstract

Cooperation is a very common phenomenon in the predator population. It can also be considered as one kind of Allee effect. By cooperation, we mean that the consumption rate per predator is dependent on the density of the predator. Despite a few recent studies the study of such systems is rare in the literature. It is well known from previous studies that incorporation of Allee effect in prey population enables the models to address many complex dynamical features. On the other hand, the dynamics of a generalist predator in a prey–predator system is also a very important area of research on populations. In this work, we concentrate on a model where Allee effect is incorporated in the prey growth in the presence of hunting cooperation in a generalist predator to observe how the Allee effect and the hunting cooperation affect the dynamics. Here we mainly study the stability and bifurcation of the system and hence describe the global dynamics to see how the Allee effect in prey and hunting cooperation affect the system dynamics.