Existence of limit cycles and homoclinic bifurcation in a plant-herbivore model with toxin-determined functional response (Q2259256)

The authors present a thorough analytical investigation of a two-dimensional plant-herbivore model with a socalled toxin-determined functional response. This type of functional response, which can be unimodal as well as monotonically increasing, modifies the traditional Holling type II functional response by introducing plant toxins that reduce herbivore growth. In two preceding papers, co-authored by one of the present authors, the complex dynamics of this model has been studied by local bifurcation analysis. The aim of the present paper is to extend those results to a global investigation. This is achieved by using Poincaré compactification, the theory of rotated vector fields, and the extended planar termination principle. In this way, for the unimodal case, the authors prove the existence of Hopf bifurcation whose limit cycles end up in a homoclinic bifurcation. In the case of monotonically increasing functional response, a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of limit cycles is established. There are no analytical results with regard to uniqueness of limit cycles.