Dynamics in a time-discrete food-chain model with strong pressure on preys (Q2204459)

Discrete-time models have played a key role in understanding complex ecosystems, especially for those organisms with one generation per year, i.e., univoltine species. Discrete ecological models have been studied for a long time, and special attention has been paid to food chains, which include three species in both continuous and discrete time systems. The article considers this problem in the form of a simple trophic model of three types of interactions, which generalizes the well-known two-dimensional model of a predator-prey, given by difference equations. The new three-dimensional model introduces a new top-class predator that will eat the predator and hinder the growth of prey. A complete description of local dynamics and bifurcations in a wide area of three-dimensional space of parameters, containing the corresponding ecological dynamics, is given. This parameter cuboid is built using the prey growth rate and two predation rates as axes. The first level of predation refers to the predator eating prey, and the second level of predation is the consumption of the first type of predators by the top predator. It is shown that the path to chaos associated with an increase in the strength of predators is set by bifurcations of doubling the period of the invariant curves, which arise as a result of the supercritical Neimark-Sacker bifurcation. The so-called escaping set has been identified, causing the sudden extinction of populations. These escaping sets contain zones in which iterations go outside the domain of the invariant set (for example, exceed the capacity) and then make the population densities negative (these scenarios are considered as extinctions). For some parameter values, these elusive regions have a complex fractal structure. Several parametric zones have been identified for which there are different dynamic results: the extinction of all species, the extinction of the main predator, the extinction of both predators, and the preservation of three species in different attractors of coexistence. Periodic and chaotic regimes are identified using numerical bifurcation diagrams and Lyapunov exponents. Interestingly, this path to chaos in the case of an increase in predation directly on prey (tuning \(\beta\)) may involve the unstable resistance of the entire species through periodic or chaotic dynamics, avoiding the extinction of top predators. This result is another example of how unstable dynamics (such as chaos) can contribute to the coexistence or survival of species, as shown by other authors in the framework of homeochaotic and metapopulation dynamics.