A Comparative Study of Two Food Chain Models with and Without Adaptive Traits

Abstract

A three – species food chain model consisting of adaptive traits and another one without adaptive traits are presented. We analyzed the existence and the stability of their equilibria and found that the model with adaptive traits is more stable than the model without adaptive traits and also, ????₀ in both models are unstable while the states where the three populations persist is locally asymptotically stable under prescribe conditions. Furthermore, from the numerical experiments using hypothetical data, the study confirms the role of adaptive traits as important attributes of the prey for coexistence of species in a three species food chain involving a resource, a prey and a predator.