Asymptotic stability of tri-trophic food chains sharing a common resource

摘要

One of the key results of the food web theory states that the interior equilibrium of a tri-trophic food chain described by the Lotka-Volterra type dynamics is globally asymptotically stable whenever it exists. This article extends this result to food webs consisting of several food chains sharing a common resource. A Lyapunov function for such food webs is constructed and asymptotic stability of the interior equilibrium is proved. Numerical simulations show that as the number of food chains increases, the real part of the leading eigenvalue, while still negative, approaches zero. Thus the resilience of such food webs decreases with the number of food chains in the web. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.