Dynamics of a plant-herbivore model with a chemically-mediated numerical response

Abstract

A system of two ordinary differential equations is proposed to model chemically-mediated interactions between plants and herbivores by incorporating a toxin-modifiednumerical response. This numerical response accounts for the reduction in the her-bivore's growth and reproduction due to chemical defenses from plants. It is shownthat the system exhibits very rich dynamics including saddle-node bifurcations, Hopfbifurcations, homoclinic bifurcations and co-dimension 2 bifurcations. Numerical sim-ulations are presented to illustrate the occurrence of multitype bistability, limit cycles,homoclinic orbits and heteroclinic orbits. We also discuss the ecological implicationsof the resulting dynamics.