Stability and Hopf Bifurcation of Three-Species Prey-Predator System with Time Delays and Allee Effect

Abstract EN

Allee effect is one of the important factors in ecology, and taking it into account can cause significant impacts in the system dynamics.

In this paper, we study the dynamics of a two-prey one-predator system, where the growth of both prey populations is subject to Allee effects, and there is a direct competition between the two-prey species having a common predator.

Two discrete time delays τ1 and τ2 are incorporated into the model to represent reaction time of predators.

Sufficient conditions for local stability of positive interior equilibrium and existence of Hopf bifurcations in terms of threshold parameters τ1∗ and τ2∗ are obtained.

A Lyapunov functional is deducted to investigate the global stability of positive interior equilibrium.

Sensitivity analysis to evaluate the uncertainty of the state variables to small changes in the Allee parameters is also investigated.

Presence of Allee effect and time delays in the model increases the complexity of the model and enriches the dynamics of the system.

Some numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.

The model is highly sensitive to small changes in Allee parameters at the early stages and with low population densities, and this sensitivity decreases with time.