Global boundedness and stability of a predator–prey model with alarm-taxis

Abstract

This paper deals with the global boundedness and stability of classical solutions to an important alarm-taxis ecosystem that is significant in understanding the behaviors of prey and predators. Specifically, it studies the case where prey attracts the secondary predators when threatened by the primary predators. The secondary consumers pursue the signal generated by the interaction between the prey and direct consumers. However, obtaining the necessary gradient estimates for global existence seems difficult in the critical case due to the strong coupled structure. Therefore, a new approach is developed to estimate the gradient of prey and primary predators, which takes advantage of slightly higher damping power. Subsequently, the boundedness of classical solutions in two-dimension with Neumann boundary conditions can be established by energy estimates and semigroup theory. Moreover, by constructing Lyapunov functional, it is proved that the coexistence homogeneous steady states are asymptotically stable, and the convergence rate is exponential under certain assumptions on the system coefficients.