Stability and persistence of facultative mutualism with populations interacting in a food chain (Q804519)

We investigate a model of four interacting populations where one of them, a mutualist, interacts with the other three so as to benefit and receive benefit from one of those three. We are interested in establishing criteria for persistence and stability, which can be interpreted as the survival of all biological populations. There are now many papers in the literature dealing with mutualistic systems. Most of these papers deal with two-dimensional systems, modeling direct mutualism between two populations and ignoring all other population interactions.