Extinction in the lotka-volterra model

Matthew Parker, Alex Kamenev

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

51 Scopus citations

Abstract

Birth-death processes often exhibit an oscillatory behavior. We investigate a particular case where the oscillation cycles are marginally stable on the mean-field level. An iconic example of such a system is the Lotka-Volterra model of predator-prey interaction. Fluctuation effects due to discreteness of the populations destroy the mean-field stability and eventually drive the system toward extinction of one or both species. We show that the corresponding extinction time scales as a certain power-law of the population sizes. This behavior should be contrasted with the extinction of models stable in the mean-field approximation. In the latter case the extinction time scales exponentially with size.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number021129
JournalPhysical Review E - Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics
Volume80
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 27 2009

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