Abstract
Competition is known in biology through various mechanisms and species often compete for resources indirectly. We consider a system consisting of a predator, prey, which is not fully consumed and converts to a secondary resource (carcasses), and scavengers, which feed on the carcasses. Such an ecosystem is a simplified sketch of interactions in the savannah between lions and spotted hyenas, with lions killing herbivore prey, especially ungulates, whose leftovers serve as primary food for the hyenas. We perform an analytic and numerical study of the possible bifurcations which the model presents between states where one or more species are absent and the coexistence state.
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Acknowledgements
This paper was in part written during a visit of E.V. and F.A. at the Laboratoire Chrono-Environnement de l’Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon, France. Both E.V. and F.A. thank Antoine Perasso, Francis Raoul, Michael Coeurdassier and Renaud Scheifler for their kind hospitality. The authors thank Henri Laurie for the useful discussions. The work of V.S. and P.R. is supported in part by the Bulgarian Fund for Scientific Research (FNI) under Contract No. KP-06-KOST/13. F. A. and E.V. are members of the INdAM research group GNCS.
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Acotto, F., Suvandjieva, V., Rashkov, P. et al. A model for lions–hyenas interactions. Comp. Appl. Math. 43, 236 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40314-024-02761-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40314-024-02761-z
Keywords
- Top predator interactions
- Trophic chain
- Apparent competition
- Scavenging
- Kleptoparasitism
- Herbivore carcasses
- Spotted hyenas
- Savannah lions