Permanence and Global Attractivity of Discrete Predator-Prey System with Hassell-Varley Type Functional Response

Abstract

By constructing a suitable Lyapunov function and using the comparison theorem of difference equation, sufficient conditions which ensure the permanence and global attractivity of the discrete predator-prey system with Hassell-Varley type functional response are obtained. Example together with its numerical simulation shows that the main results are verifiable.

1. Introduction

The dynamic relationship between predators and their prey has long been and will continue to be one of the dominant themes in both ecology and mathematical ecology due to its universal existence and importance [1]. The most popular predator-prey model is the one with Holling type II functional response [2]: where , denote the density of prey and predator species at time , respectively. The constants , , , , , are all positive constants that stand for prey intrinsic growth rate, carrying capacity of prey species, capturing rate, half saturation constant, maximal predator growth rate, predator death rate, respectively.

Standard Lotka-Volterra type models, on which a large body of existing predator-prey theory is built, assume that the per capita rate of predation depends on the prey numbers only. There is growing explicit biological and physiological evidence [3–8] that in many situations, especially when predators have to search and share or compete for food, a more suitable general predator-prey model should be based on the “ratio-dependent’’ theory.

Arditi and Ginzburg [9] proposed the following predator-prey model with ratio-dependent type functional response:

It was known that the functional response can depend on predator density in other ways. One of the more widely known ones is due to Hassell and Varley [10]. A general predator-prey model with Hassell-Varley tape functional response may take the following form: This model is appropriate for interactions, where predators form groups and have applications in biological control. System (1.3) can display richer and more plausible dynamics. In a typical predator-prey interaction where predators do not form groups, one can assume that , producing the so-called ratio-dependent predator-prey dynamics [11]. For terrestrial predators that form a fixed number of tight groups, it is often reasonable to assume that For aquatic predators that form a fixed number of tight groups, may be more appropriate. Recently, Hsu [11] presents a systematic analysis on the above system.

On the other hand, when the size of the population is rarely small or the population has nonoverlapping generation, the discrete time models are more appropriate than the continuous ones [12–24]. This motivated us to propose and study the discrete analogous of predator-prey system (1.3): where ; , , , , , are all bounded nonnegative sequences. For the rest of the paper, we use the following notations: for any bounded sequence , set

By the biological meaning, we will focus our discussion on the positive solution of system of (1.3). Thus, we require that

2. Permanence

In order to establish the persistent result for system (1.4), we make some preparations.

Definition 2.1. System (1.4) said to be permanent if there exist positive constants and , which are independent of the solution of system (1.4), such that for any positive solution of system (1.4) satisfies

Lemma 2.2 (see [23]). Assume that satisfies and for , where and are all nonnegative sequences bounded above and below by positive constants. Then

Lemma 2.3 (see [23]). Assume that satisfies and , where and are all nonnegative sequences bounded above and below by positive constants and . Then

Theorem 2.4. Assume that hold, then system (1.4) is permanent, that is, for any positive solution of system (1.4), one has where

Proof. We divided the proof into four claims.Claim 1. From the first equation of (1.4), we have By Lemma 2.2, we have Above inequality shows that for any , there exists a , such that Claim 2. We divide it into two cases to prove that Case (i)
There exists an , such that . Then by the second equation of system (1.4), we have Hence, therefore, and so, It follows that We claim that By a way of contradiction, assume that there exists a such that . Then . Let be the smallest integer such that . Then . The above argument produces that , a contradiction. This prove the claim.Case (ii)
We assume that for all . Since is nonincreasing and has a lower bound , we know that exists, denoted by , then We claim that By a way of contradiction, assume that . Taking limit in the second equation in system (1.4) gives which is a contradiction since for This prove the claim, then we have Combining Cases (i) and (ii), we see that Let , we have Claim 3 (). Conditions () imply that for enough small positive constant , we have For above , it follows form Claims 1 and 2 that there exists a such that for all From the first equation of (1.4), we have By applying Lemma 2.3 to above inequality, we have Setting in (2.28) leads to This ends the proof of Claim 3.Claim 4. For any small positive constant , from Claims 1–3, it follows that there exists a such that for all We present two cases to prove that Case (i)
There exists an such that , then Hence and so, Set We claim that for By a way of contradiction, assume that there exists a , such that Then Let be the smallest integer such that Then which implies that a contradiction, this proves the claim.Case (ii)
We assume that for all . According to (2.30), exists, denoted by , then We claim that By the way of contradiction, assume that . Taking limit in the second equation in system (1.4) gives which is a contradiction since for The above analysis show that Letting , we have where According to Claims 1–4, we can easily find that the result of Theorem 2.4 holds.

3. Global Attractivity

Theorem 3.1. Assume that () and () hold. Assume further that there exist positive constants , and such that Then system (1.4) with initial condition (1.6) is globally attractive, that is, for any two positive solutions and of system (1.4), one has

Proof. From conditions () and (), there exists an enough small positive constant such that Since () and () hold, for any positive solutions and of system (1.4), it follows from Theorem 2.4 that For above and (3.3), there exists a such that for all , Let Then from the first equation of system (1.3), we have Using the Mean Value Theorem, we get where lies between and , lies between and .
It follows from (3.6), (3.7) that And so, for Let Then from the second equation of system (1.4), we have Using the Mean Value Theorem, we get where lie between and , respectively. Then, it follows from (3.11), (3.12) that for Now we define a Lyapunov function as follows: Calculating the difference of along the solution of system (1.4), for , it follows from (3.9) and (3.13) that Summating both sides of the above inequalities from to , we have which implies It follows that Using the fundamental theorem of positive series, there exists small enough positive constant such that which implies that that is This completes the proof of Theorem 3.1.