Fear Induced Stabilization in an Intraguild Predation Model

In the present paper, we investigate the impact of fear in an intraguild predation model. We consider that the growth rate of intraguild prey (IG prey) is reduced due to the cost of fear of intraguild predator (IG predator), and the growth rate of basal prey is suppressed due to the cost of fear of both the IG prey and the IG predator. The basic mathematical results such as positively invariant space, boundedness of the solutions, persistence of the system have been investigated. We further analyze the existence and local stability of the biologically feasible equilibrium points, and also study the Hopf-bifurcation analysis of the system with respect to the fear parameter. The direction of Hopf-bifurcation and the stability properties of the periodic solutions have also been investigated. We observe that in the absence of fear, omnivory produces chaos in a three-species food chain system. However, fear can stabilize the chaos thus obtained. We also observe that the system shows bistability behavior between IG prey free equilibrium and IG predator free equilibrium, and bistability between IG prey free equilibrium and interior equilibrium. Furthermore, we observe that for a suitable set of parameter values, the system may exhibit multiple stable limit cycles. We perform extensive numerical simulations to explore the rich dynamics of a simple intraguild predation model with fear effect.