Bifurcation and complexity of Monod type predator--prey system in a pulsed chemostat (Q813760)

The authors introduce and investigate a predator-prey model that involves a periodically pulsed substrate as a third unknown variable. The right-hand side of this three-dimensional system consists of linear terms and two kinds of nonlinear terms expressing a satiation effect of prey and predator if the substrate resp. prey concentrations are sufficiently large. In the theoretical part of the paper, the existence of a positive periodic solution is proved whose stability depends on the parameters of the system, such that for certain parameter regions, only the zero solution for both predator and prey or simply the predator is globally asymptotically stable. Further results on possible bifurcation are obtained by numerical investigation. Here, two different parameters and, moreover, the period of the pulses act as bifurcation parameters. In this way, different routes to chaos are documented, e.g., a cascade of period doubling, strange attractor, chaotic region with period windows, and finally a cascade of period halving.