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The (De)Stabilizing effect of juvenile prey cannibalism in a stage-structured model
Eric M Takyi1, Kasey Cooper1, Ava Dreher2
1Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA 19426, USA.
Abstract:
Cannibalism, or intraspecific predation, is the act of an organism consuming another organism of the same species. In predator-prey relationships, there is experimental evidence to support the existence of cannibalism among juvenile prey. In this work, we propose a stage-structured predator-prey system where cannibalism occurs only in the juvenile prey population. We show that cannibalism has both a stabilizing and destabilizing effect depending on the choice of parameters. We perform stability analysis of the system and also show that the system experiences a supercritical Hopf, saddle-node, Bogdanov-Takens and cusp bifurcation. We perform numerical experiments to further support our theoretical findings. We discuss the ecological implications of our results.
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