Dynamics of a size-structured predator–prey model with chemotaxis mechanism

Abstract

This paper is concerned with a size-structured diffusive predator–prey model with chemotaxis mechanism. The existence, linearized stability and monotonicity with respect to the growth rates of boundary steady-state solutions are analyzed. Moreover, the global stability of trivial steady-state solution under certain conditions is proved by constructing Lyapunov functional. We investigate the local and global bifurcations of positive steady-state solutions that emanate from semi-trivial steady-state solutions using Lyapunov–Schmidt reduction and bifurcation techniques when the fertility intensity of a predator or prey is used as a bifurcation parameter. It is shown that the nonlinear nonlocal chemotaxis term can lead to the emergence of Allee effect.