The effect of nonlocal interaction on chaotic dynamics, Turing patterns, and population invasion in a prey–predator model

Abstract

Pattern formation is a central process that helps to understand the individuals’ organizations according to different environmental conditions. This paper investigates a nonlocal spatiotemporal behavior of a prey–predator model with the Allee effect in the prey population and hunting cooperation in the predator population. The nonlocal interaction is considered in the intra-specific prey competition, and we find the analytical conditions for Turing and Hopf bifurcations for local and nonlocal models and the spatial-Hopf bifurcation for the nonlocal model. Different comparisons have been made between the local and nonlocal models through extensive numerical investigation to study the impact of nonlocal interaction. In particular, a legitimate range of nonlocal interaction coefficients causes the occurrence of spatial-Hopf bifurcation, which is the emergence of periodic patterns in both time and space from homogeneous periodic solutions. With an increase in the range of nonlocal interaction, the whole Turing pattern suppresses after a certain threshold, and no pure Turing pattern exists for such cases. Specifically, at low diffusion rates for the predators, nonlocal interaction in the prey population leads to the extinction of predators. As the diffusion rate of predators increases, impulsive wave solutions emerge in both prey and predator populations in a one-dimensional spatial domain. This study also includes the effect of nonlocal interaction on the invasion of populations in a two-dimensional spatial domain, and the nonlocal model produces a patchy structure behind the invasion where the local model predicts only the homogeneous structure for such cases.