Additional food causes predator "explosion" -- unless the predators compete

TL;DR

This paper investigates how additional food and predator competition influence predator-prey dynamics, revealing complex bifurcations and showing that extra food can hinder or enhance biological control depending on competition effects.

Contribution

It introduces a new predator-prey model incorporating predator competition induced by additional food, analyzing its bifurcations and dynamical behaviors, including novel symmetry-driven bifurcations.

Findings

Additional food can hinder pest control by causing predator explosion.

Predator competition induces multiple bifurcation types, including novel symmetry-based bifurcations.

Complex dynamics such as homoclinic orbits, limit cycles, and Turing patterns are observed.

Abstract

The literature posits that an introduced predator population, is able to drive it's target pest population extinct, if supplemented with high quality additional food of quantity $\xi > \xi_{critical}$, \cite{SP11, SPV18, SPD17, SPM13}. We show this approach leads to infinite time blow-up of the predator population. We propose an alternate model in which the additional food induces predator competition. Analysis herein indicates that there are threshold values $c^{*}_{1} < c^{*}_{2} < c^{*}_{3}$ of the competition parameter $c$, s.t. when $c < c^{*}_{1}$, the pest free state is globally stable, when $c^{*}_{2} < c < c^{*}_{3}$, bi-stability is possible, and when $c^{*}_{3} < c$, up to three interior equilibriums could exist. As $c$ and $\xi$-$c$ are varied, standard co-dimension one and co-dimension two bifurcations are observed. The recent dynamical systems literature involving predator competition, report several non-standard bifurcations such as the saddle-node-transcritical bifurcation (SNTC) occurring in co-dimension two \cite{KSV10, BS07}, and cusp-transcritical bifurcation (CPTC) in co-dimension three, \cite{D20, BS07}. We show that in our model structural symmetries can be exploited to construct a SNTC in co-dimension two, and a CPTC also in co-dimension two. We further use these symmetries to construct a novel pitchfork-transcritical bifurcation (PTC) in co-dimension two, thus explicitly characterizing a new organizing center of the model. Dynamics such as homoclinic orbits, concurrently occurring limit cycles, and competition driven Turing patterns are also observed. Our findings indicate that increasing additional food in predator-pest models, can hinder bio-control, contrary to some of the literature. However, additional food that also induces predator competition, leads to novel bio-control scenarios, and complements the work in \cite{H21, B98, K04, D20, BS07, VH19}.