A model of the burglar alarm hypothesis of prey alarm calls

Authors

Evan C. Haskell, Nova Southeastern UniversityFollow
Jonathan Bell, University of Maryland Baltimore County

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-2021

Publication Title

Theoretical Population Biology

Keywords

Predator–prey, Burglar alarm hypothesis, Taxis, Pattern formation, Bifurcation, Stability

ISSN

0040-5809

Volume

141

First Page

1

Last Page

13

Abstract

When approached by a predator many prey species will emit an “alarm call” as a form of anti-predator behavior. One hypothesis for the function of alarm calls is the “burglar alarm” hypothesis whereby upon attack, a prey renders itself dangerous to a predator by generating an alarm call that attracts a predator at higher trophic levels in the food chain; that is, attracts a predator to the prey’s own predator. This paper concerns a model incorporating a mechanism to test the burglar alarm hypothesis. We prove in one space dimension global existence, of positive bounded classical solutions, and establish existence of non-constant equilibrium solutions and assess their stability. We provide some representative numerical simulations to emphasize the nature of pattern formation for this model and demonstrate the benefit achieved by a signal inducing prey species under the burglar alarm hypothesis.

Comments

© 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

NSUWorks Citation

Haskell, Evan C. and Bell, Jonathan, "A model of the burglar alarm hypothesis of prey alarm calls" (2021). Mathematics Faculty Articles. 317.
https://nsuworks.nova.edu/math_facarticles/317

DOI

10.1016/j.tpb.2021.05.004