Asymmetric games in a robber-plant-pollinator system

摘要

The system of nectar robbers, pollinators, defensive plants and tolerant plants is characterized by replicator equations, where payoffs for the four species are represented by interaction outcomes of the corresponding Lotka-Volterra predator-prey models and consumer-resource models. Our aim is to show mechanisms how and when the pollination mutualisms persist as there are robbers. We focus on four factors in the plant-animal system: the transporting cost of the pollinators, the pollinating benefit for the plants, the negative effects of deterrence on the robbers and pollinators. Through rigorous analysis, we display regions of the factors in which the four species coexist and the pollination mutualisms persist. We demonstrate that the coexistence occurs in periodic oscillations. Furthermore, we show that when in coexistence, the robbers have the same fitness as the pollinators, while the defensive plants have the same fitness as the tolerant plants.