Analysis of a stochastic predator–prey population model with Allee effect and jumps

The dynamic relationship between predators and their preys has been universal in both ecology and mathematical ecology [1, 2]. The classic predator–prey population model is the Lotka–Volterra model established by Alfred James Lotka and Vito Volterra in the 1920s. There are many extensive studies in the literature concerned with the dynamics of the predator–prey models and we here do not mention them in detail. However, for the last decade, the importance of the Allee effect has been recognized. Because of the difficulties in finding mates when the prey population density becomes low, the Allee effect may occur in prey species [3]. For example, this might correspond to the density below which it is so difficult to find a mate that reproduction does not compensate for mortality. In [4], the authors studied the following deterministic predator–prey population with Allee effect on prey: with initial values \(x(0)=x_{0}\), \(y(0)=y_{0}\). Here \(x(t)\) and \(y(t)\) represent, respectively, the size of prey and predator population at time t; b is the per capita maximum fertility rate of prey population; \(d_{i}\) (\(i = 1,2\)) are the per capita death rates of prey and predators, respectively; α denotes the strength of the intra-competition of the prey population; s denotes the effective search rate; \(h_{1}\) denotes the handling time of predators; and \(c_{1}\) denotes the conversion efficiency of ingested prey into new predators. The product, \(\frac{s x(t)}{1+s h_{1}x(t)}\), represents the predator’s functional response. All the parameters of the model are supposed to be positive constants.

It is well known that populations in nature are inevitably subjected to various types of environmental noise. During the past decades, a great deal of attention has been paid to the study of stochastic biological models (see [5‐9]). In [10], the authors perturb the death rates \(d_{1}\) of prey and \(d_{2}\) of the predator population in (1.1) with Gaussian white noise and obtain the following stochastic predator–prey population model:

However, biological systems may suffer sudden environmental shocks: such as earthquakes, toxic pollutants, hurricanes and so on. Note that these sudden environmental shocks will cause jumps in the population dynamics. As mentioned in [11], here a jump means a sudden shift on the size of biological population, and the mathematical explanation is that sample paths are not continuous almost surely. It is recognized that stochastic differential equations with Lévy noise are quite suitable to describe such a discontinuous system. Recently, stochastic differential equations with Lévy processes have been researched widely both in theory and their applications [12‐16]. References [13] and [14] are devoted to the stochastic Lotka–Volterra population dynamics with jumps, and the former with a stochastic competitive Lotka–Volterra model, and the latter with a general Lotka–Volterra model. In [15], the authors studied the asymptotic behavior of a stochastic population model with Allee effect and Lévy jumps.

Motivated by the above discussion, in this paper, we consider the following stochastic predator–prey model with Allee effect and Lévy jumps: with initial values \(x(0)=x_{0}\), \(y(0)=y_{0}\). Here \(x(t-)\) is the left limit of \(x(t)\) and \(y(t-)\) is the left limit of \(y(t)\). All meanings of the parameters are exact as or similar to those for (1.1) except the following. \(w(t)=\{w_{1}(t),w_{2}(t)\}\) represents a standard two-dimensional Brownian motion defined on a compete probability space \((\varOmega ,\mathcal{F},\mathbb{P})\) with a filtration \(\{\mathcal{F} _{t}\}_{t\geq 0}\) satisfying the usual conditions (i.e. it is right continuous and \(\mathcal{F}_{0}\) contains all P-null sets). \(N(\cdot ,\cdot )\) is a Poisson counting process with characteristic measure λ on measurable subset Γ of \([0,\infty )\) with \(\lambda (\varGamma )<\infty \). Then the compensated Poisson random measure \(\widetilde{N}(\text{d}t, \text{d}u)=N(\text{d}t, \text{d}u)-\lambda (\text{d}u)\, \text{d}t\) is a martingale, which is independent of \(w(t)\). Usually, the pair \((w,N)\) is called Lévy noise. Throughout this paper, we denote \(\mathbb{R}_{+}^{2}=\{(x,y)\in \mathbb{R}^{2}:x>0,y>0 \}\) and assume that \(\gamma _{i}(u)<1\) are bounded functions on Γ, \(i=1,2\).

The remainder of the present paper is organized as follows. First, in Sect. 2, we prove that this model has a unique global positive solution starting from the positive initial value by the comparison theorem of stochastic differential equations. In Sect. 3, we investigate the asymptotic pathwise behavior of the model by using the generalized exponential martingale inequality and the Borel–Cantelli lemma. Extinction conditions of the population will be established in Sect. 4. In Sect. 5, we show that the global positive solution is stochastically ultimate bounded under some conditions. Section 6 contains numerical results, which are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results in this paper. The paper ends with a conclusion.

In this section, by using comparison theorem of stochastic differential equations, we show that system (1.3) has a unique positive global solution with positive initial value. For simplicity, we introduce the following notation: Note that \(\gamma _{i}(u)<1\) on Γ. Thus, for any \(u\in \varGamma \), we have \(1-\gamma _{i}(u)>0\). By the basic inequality \(x-1-\ln x \geq 0\) for \(x>0\), we have Thus, \(\beta _{i}=\frac{\sigma _{i}^{2}}{2}-\int _{\varGamma }[\ln (1-\gamma _{i}(u))+\gamma _{i}(u)]\lambda (\mathrm{d}u)\geq \frac{\sigma _{i}^{2}}{2}>0\), \(i=1,2\). Moreover, we assume that there is a constant \(K>0\) such that

The pathwise properties of the solutions are the subject of the present section. For later applications, we first give a useful lemma, which is a generalization of an exponential martingale inequality with jumps.

For a stochastic equation, we are interested in the long time behavior. In this section, we investigate how the intensities of noises and the Allee effect affect extermination of the predator population and the prey population. From Theorem 3.2, it is easy to see that the following theorem holds.

Now, we investigate how Allee effect and the intensities of noises affect the prey population and then the predator population.

Form Theorem 4.3, we can get the following corollary with the proof being omitted.

In this section, we investigate the stochastically ultimate boundedness of system (1.3). Firstly, its definition will be given.

We provide the following useful lemmas from which the stochastically ultimate boundedness follows directly. Denote \(\mathbb{R}_{+}=(0, \infty )\).

According to Chebyshev’s inequality and the application of Lemmas 5.2 and 5.3, we have the following result.

In this section, we make numerical simulations to illustrate our results by using the method by stationary Poisson point processes [11]. Numerical experiments are made by using the following set of parameters: \(\varGamma =(0,+\infty )\), \(\lambda (\varGamma )=1\), initial value \((30,4)\) and some parameter values are shown in the table below (see [10]).

(i) Assume that \(\alpha =0.01\), \(A_{1}=0.5\), \(\sigma _{1}^{2}= \sigma _{2}^{2}=0.005\), \(\gamma _{1}(u)=\gamma _{2}(u)=0.05\) and for the other parameter values see Table 1. By a simple computation, \(\alpha A_{1}=0.005\), \(\beta _{i}=0.0038\), \(i=1,2\). Thus, \(b-(d_{1}+ \beta _{1})=0.2082\), \((\sqrt{b}-\sqrt{d_{1}+\beta _{1}})^{2}\approx 0.13\) and \(\frac{c_{1}}{h_{1}}-d_{2}-\beta _{2}<0\). Therefore, the conditions of Theorem 4.3 are not satisfied while the condition of Theorem 4.1 is fulfilled. From Theorem 4.1, it follows that the predator population becomes extinct with probability one. As can be seen from Fig. 1 that the prey population does not become extinct and predator population becomes extinct.

(ii) Moreover, for the same \(\alpha =0.01\), intensities of white noises \(\sigma _{1}^{2}=\sigma _{2}^{2}=0.005\), jumps \(\gamma _{1}(u)= \gamma _{2}(u)=0.05\) and greater Allee effect constant, \(A_{1}=20\), we can obtain \(\alpha A_{1}=0.2\), \(b-(d_{1}+\beta _{1})=0.2082\) and \((\sqrt{b}-\sqrt{d_{1}+\beta _{1}})^{2}=0.1299\). This implies the condition (ii) of Theorem 4.3 is fulfilled. Then, from Theorem 4.3, it follows that both prey population and predator population become extinct. Figures 2(a) and 2(b) are the trajectories of prey population and predator population, respectively. From Fig. 2, we can see that both prey population and predator population become extinct. Comparing Figs. 1(a) and 2(a), we can conclude that stronger Allee effects can lead to the extinction of the prey population, even if intensity of noise is not high.

(iii) For the same α and \(A_{1}\) taken as those in (i). If intensities of white noises \(\sigma _{1}^{2}=0.31\), \(\sigma _{2}^{2}=0.2\) and jumps \(\gamma _{1}(u)=0.1\), \(\gamma _{2}(u)=0.05\), then \(\alpha A_{1}=0.005\), \(b-(d_{1}+\beta _{1})=0.0516\), \((\sqrt{b}-\sqrt{d_{1}+\beta _{1}})^{2}=0.003481\), \(b- (d_{1}+\frac{ \sigma _{1}^{2}}{2} )=0.057\) and \((\sqrt{b}-\sqrt{d_{1}+\frac{ \sigma _{1}^{2}}{2}} )^{2}=0.00426\). Then condition (ii) in Theorem 4.3 holds and condition \((C_{2})\) in Corollary 4.4 holds. Thus, from Theorem 4.3 and Corollary 4.4 the prey populations in (1.2) and (1.3) both become extinct. As can be seen from Fig. 3(a) that the prey population in system (1.2) and (1.3) both become extinct. Moreover, if intensity of white noise \(\sigma _{1}^{2}=0.05\), \(\sigma _{2}^{2}=0.2\) and jumps \(\gamma _{1}(u)=0.5\), \(\gamma _{2}(u)=0.2\), then \(\alpha A_{1}=0.005\), \(b-(d_{1}+\beta _{1})=0.0165\), \((\sqrt{b}-\sqrt{d_{1}+\beta _{1}})^{2}=0.00032\), \(b- (d_{1}+\frac{ \sigma _{1}^{2}}{2} )=0.2095\) and \((\sqrt{b}-\sqrt{d_{1}+\frac{ \sigma _{1}^{2}}{2}} )^{2}=0.1343\). Thus, condition (ii) in Theorem 4.3 holds while all the conditions in Corollary 4.4 are not satisfied. Therefore, from Theorem 4.3, it follows that the prey population in system (1.3) becomes extinct. As can be seen from Fig. 3(b) that the prey population in system (1.3) becomes extinct while the prey population in model (1.2) does not become extinct. Comparing Figs. 1(a) and 3(a), we conclude that white noise can lead to the extinction of prey population. Comparing Figs. 3(a) and 3(b), we conclude that jumps can lead to the extinction of prey population.

(iv) Choose \(b=0.02\), \(d_{1}=0.04\), \(\alpha =0.01\), \(A_{1}=3\), \(\sigma _{1}^{2}=0.3\), \(\sigma _{2}^{2}=0.2\), \(\gamma _{1}(u)= \gamma _{2}(u)=0.1\) and the other parameters are taken as in Table 1. By a simple computation, \(\alpha A_{1}=0.03>-0.175=b-(d_{1}+\beta _{1})\). This means condition (i) in Theorem 4.3 holds. Hence, from Theorem 4.3, it follows that the prey population and predator both become extinct. Moreover, we have \(\alpha A_{1}>b\) and \(b< d_{1}\leq 3b\). However, from Remark 4.5, if \(\alpha A _{1}>b\) and \(b< d_{1}\leq 3b\), then all conditions of Theorem 3.2 in [10] are not hold. From Fig. 4, we can see that the prey population will become extinct with probability one and then the predator population.

In this paper, we consider a stochastic predator–prey population model with Allee effect and Lévy noise. First, by the comparison theorem of stochastic differential equations and the Itô formula, we prove that this model has a unique global positive solution starting from the positive initial value. Then we investigate the asymptotic pathwise behavior of the model by the generalized exponential martingale inequality and the Borel–Cantelli lemma. Next, we establish the conditions under which extinction of predator and prey populations occur. Furthermore, we show that the global positive solution is stochastically ultimate bounded under some conditions by using the Chebyshev’s inequality. At last, we introduce some numerical simulations to support the main results obtained.

When \(\gamma _{1}(u)=\gamma _{2}(u)=0\), we can get the stochastic predator–prey population (1.2), which is studied in [10]. From Remark 4.5, it follows that Corollary 4.4 generalizes and improves Theorem 3.2 in [10]. Moreover, our investigation shows that the Allee effect, white noise and jumps may cause great influence on the survival of species. It can be seen from Figs. 1(a) and 2(a) that stronger Allee effects can lead to the extinction of prey population, even if intensity of noise is not high. From Figs. 1(a), 3(a) and 3(b), we can conclude that the high intensity noise and jumps can also lead to the extinction of prey population, even if the Allee effects is not large. Therefore, Allee effect is an important factor in population modeling. Moreover, considering the sudden environmental shocks, a stochastic model especially with jumps is better than a deterministic model in describing the population dynamics.