Controlling Chaos in a Food Chain Model through Threshold Harvesting

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new harvesting strategy namely the harvesting for controlling chaotic population in a food chain model. In particular, we have taken the three species Hastings and Powell food chain model for demonstration. We have shown threshold harvesting strategy can be effectively employed to obtain a steady or cyclic behaviour from chaotic fish population by varying either the frequency of harvesting or the amount of harvesting of fish population. Numerical simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the scheme. We obtain steady state; limit cycle, period-2 and period-4 behaviour from chaotic Hastings and Powell model. This threshold harvesting strategy will be very useful for species conservation and fishery management