Dynamical behaviors and optimal harvesting of an intraguild prey-predator fishery model with Michaelis-Menten type predator harvesting

The present paper discusses the dynamics and optimal harvesting of an intraguild prey-predator fishery model by incorporating the nonlinear Michaelis-Menten type of harvesting in predator. To our knowledge, there is limited literature working on Michaelis-Menten type of harvesting in a three species intraguild model with variable carrying capacity. The carrying capacity is proportional to the density of biotic resource. The existence of the possible equilibria has been studied along with the stability criteria. We consider the impact of predator fish harvesting as the bifurcation parameter to analyze the long time behavior of the proposed system. From the economic perspective, bionomic equilibrium of the system is studied and optimal harvesting policy is derived with the assistance of Pontryagin Maximum Principle. Finally, numerical results are presented to verify our analytical results. It is shown that in the bifurcation diagrams, the system can exhibit transcritical and Hopf bifurcations in the neighborhood of coexistence equilibrium at low and relatively high level of predator harvesting respectively. Interestingly, the system enters to a bistable region where both the coexistence and predator-free equilibria can be stable depending on the initial values. This bistable behavior might be novel to the existing literature that studied intraguild models with variable carrying capacity. The objective of this study is to derive the optimal threshold for the predator harvesting that gives maximum financial profit while sustaining the fishery resources.

Automated summary

This paper discusses the dynamics and optimal harvesting of a three-species intraguild prey-predator fishery model, with a focus on the impact of predator harvesting using the Michaelis-Menten type. Through stability analysis and numerical results, different system behaviors under varying levels of predator harvesting were discovered, confirming the existence of a bistable region phenomenon.