Abstract
No species of animal lives in complete isolation. Since all animals must eat to live, all must interact, if not with other animals, then with plants. The model which we will build and then study considers the situation where one animal population serves as food for another. We will stylize the discussion by thinking of the predators as foxes, and the prey as rabbits. Note that the predators could equally well be rabbits and the “prey” lettuce. The important point is that the one species serves as the food for the other, and both grow according to some reasonable set of biological laws. The model is somewhat unrealistic in that few ecological systems are so simple as to have just two species present.
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References
Kemeny, J.G. and J.L. Snell, Mathematical Models in the Social Sciences, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1972.
Wilson, E.O. and W.H. Bossert, A Primer of Population Biology, Sinauer Associates, Stamford, CT., 1971.
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© 1979 Education Development Center, Inc.
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Frauenthal, J.C. (1979). Introduction to Two Species Models: Predator-Prey. In: Introduction to Population Modeling. The Umap Expository Monograph Series. Birkhäuser Boston. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-7322-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-7322-3_7
Publisher Name: Birkhäuser Boston
Print ISBN: 978-0-8176-3015-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4684-7322-3
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