Stability and bifurcation analysis of delayed tri‐trophic food chain model in poisoned environment with fear effect and additional food

Abstract

One of the most important goals of theoretical ecologists is to find a strategy for controlling the chaos in ecological models to maintain healthy ecosystems. We investigate the influence of fear and the supply of additional food to predators in a delayed tri‐trophic food chain model, where interference among the species is determined by Holling type‐II functional response. The proposed model incorporates the fact that the growth rates of prey and middle predators are decreased due to the fear of middle and special predators, respectively. The additional food is supplied to both predators by either nature or external agencies. Furthermore, the poisoned prey in the predator's environment is taken into account. In the proposed model, we use two time delays: one for the growth term of the middle predator and another for the gestation delay of the special predator. We determine the conditions for the existence of ecologically feasible equilibrium points and their local and global stability. In addition, we establish the conditions for the existence of Hopf bifurcation around interior equilibrium to seek periodic behavior in nondelayed and delayed models. Numerical investigations are performed to justify the proposed theoretical findings through phase portraits, time series of solutions, and bifurcation diagrams. We observe that the chaotic dynamics of a tri‐trophic food chain model can be controlled by the proper choice of the fear effect and by supplying additional food parameters. As a result, our findings provide more ecological insights into the dynamics of the delayed tri‐trophic food chain model with the fear effect and additional food supply.