Dynamical behaviour of a predator-prey system encapsulating the fear affecting death rate of prey and intra-specific competition: revisited in a fluctuating environment (Q2095156)

The paper considers the effect of random environmental fluctuations on the natural death rates of a predator-prey system that incorporates both: (i) the fear effect on the reproduction and death rate of the prey and (i) the intraspecific predator competition. It is based on the ODE model proposed in [\textit{D. Mukherjee}, Math. Comput. Simul. 177, 263--275 (2020; Zbl 07318099)], which this paper revisits in terms of equilibria and stability and further studies in terms of bifurcation diagrams on single parameters to show a wide diversity of dynamical behaviors. Then, white noise perturbations of the death rates lead to a system of stochastic differential equations (SDE). The existence, uniqueness and positiveness of the SDE solution is shown and some bounds on the population sizes are obtained. Sufficient conditions for prey and for predator extinction are determined and shown to depend on the noise level. Numerical Monte Carlo simulations by the Euler-Maruyama scheme and the corresponding phase portraits show that, depending on the noise level, one may find some kind of synchrony with the ODE model behavior or obtain a quite different behavior. To study the means and variances of the two populations avoiding computer intensive simulations, the paper proposes the use of traditional mean-field ODE approximations and shows one example, concluding that the approximation is good, although it may break down in the long run.