Host coexistence in a model for two host-one parasitoid interactions (Q2408044)

The authors study the interaction between two distinct host species and a common parasitoid, the life cycle of hosts being divided into three stages: eggs, larvae and adult. It is assumed that hosts do not compete for resources and that parasitoids can only attack the larval stage of the hosts, laying a single egg inside. Also, juvenile parasitoids are assumed to develop and emerge after a fixed host-dependent time, which leads to the consideration of a four-dimensional DDE model with constant delay. The authors first look for the equilibria of the model and investigate their stability via linearisation, obtaining in the process a double invasibility condition which leads to the instability of both single host-parasitoid equilibria and to host coexistence. It is observed that the density-dependent component of larval mortality is a mediator for host coexistence, in the sense that if both larval mortalities are density-independent, then the double invasibility condition cannot hold. Since the focus of the paper is host coexistence and it is well known that host-parasitoid systems can exhibit cycles, the coexistence of host species along an attracting periodic solution for the corresponding one-host model is also investigated via a Floquet analysis coupled with numerical simulations, as the complete analytic characterization is out of reach. It is then seen that in this case a double invasibility condition holds and the coexistence of host species becomes possible even in the absence of density dependence for larval mortality. The significance of these results for the design of pest control strategies is then outlined, several analogies with similar phenomena which occur in predator-prey systems being also drawn.