An ecoepidemiological predator-prey model with standard disease incidence

This investigation accounts for epidemics spreading among interacting populations. The infective disease spreads among the prey, of which only susceptibles reproduce, while infected prey do not grow, recover, reproduce nor compete for resources. The model is general enough to describe a large number of ecosystems, on land, in the air or in the water. The main results concern the boundedness of the trajectories, the analysis of local and global stability, system's persistency and a threshold property below which the infection disappears. A sufficiently strong disease in the prey may avoid predators extinction and its presence can destabilize an otherwise stable predator-prey configuration. The Occurrence of transcritical, saddle-node and Hopf-bifurcations is also shown. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.