Um sistema presa-predador com evasão mediada por feromônio de alarme / A predator-prey model with pursuit and evasion triggered by alarm pheromones
AUTOR(ES)
Elizabeth Machado Baptestini
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO
2006
RESUMO
Pattern, structure and emergent collective properties are ubiquitous in systems with many units (alive or inanimated) coupled through nonlinear interactions. Within this context, the study of cooperative phenomena in population dynamics of ecological interest has attracted the attention of the mathematicians and physicists since Lotka and Volterra in the 1920s. Thenceforth, in addition to differential equations, theoretical ecology has continuously incorporated powerful and well-established techniques of contacts processes, cellular automata models and others, developed in the fields of condensed matter physics, statistical physics and computational physics. In the present work, a predator-prey model with pursuit and escape triggered by alarm pheromones is proposed and studied through analytical methods and computer simulations. Such models can show oscillatory behavior of the population density, phase transitions that belong to distinct universality classes and rich stationary phase diagrams. Two distinct levels of description were used. In a first approach, we consider a model of cellular automata in which predators and preys walk on a square lattice, according specific rules for each species, in a homogeneous environment and with periodic boundary conditions. The second part of our study is based on the analysis of partial differential equations that also describes the dynamics of a prey-predator system with the same characteristics above. Both, spatially uniform or mean field like and explicit spatio-temporal partial differential equations were considered. These models can represent relevant tools to design better strategies of biological control of pests by predators. In successful cases, the pests and its predators must persist in stable interactions at a low level of pest density.
ASSUNTO(S)
fisica da materia condensada prey-predator system autômatos celulares cellular automata sistema presa-predador feromônio de alarme processo de reação-difusão alarm pheromones reaction-diffusion process
