A DELAY NONAUTONOMOUS PREDATOR–PREY MODEL FOR THE EFFECTS OF FEAR, REFUGE AND HUNTING COOPERATION

Fear of predation may assert privilege to prey species by restricting their exposure to potential predators, meanwhile it can also impose costs by constraining the exploration of optimal resources. A predator–prey model with the effect of fear, refuge, and hunting cooperation has been investigated in this paper. The system’s equilibria are obtained and their local stability behavior is discussed. The existence of Hopf-bifurcation is analytically shown by taking refuge as a bifurcation parameter. There are many ecological factors which are not instantaneous processes, and so, to make the system more realistic, we incorporate three discrete time delays: in the effect of fear, refuge and hunting cooperation, and analyze the delayed system for stability and bifurcation. Moreover, for environmental fluctuations, we further modify the delayed system by incorporating seasonality in the fear, refuge and cooperation. We have analyzed the seasonally forced delayed system for the existence of a positive periodic solution. In the support of analytical results, some numerical simulations are carried out. Sensitivity analysis is used to identify parameters having crucial impacts on the ecological balance of predator–prey interactions. We find that the rate of predation, fear, and hunting cooperation destabilizes the system, whereas prey refuge stabilizes the system. Time delay in the cooperation behavior generates irregular oscillations whereas delay in refuge stabilizes an otherwise unstable system. Seasonal variations in the level of fear and refuge generate higher periodic solutions and bursting patterns, respectively, which can be replaced by simple 1-periodic solution if the cooperation and fear are also allowed to vary with time in the former and latter situations. Higher periodicity and bursting patterns are also observed due to synergistic effects of delay and seasonality. Our results indicate that the combined effects of fear, refuge and hunting cooperation play a major role in maintaining a healthy ecological environment.