Multi-Species Prey-Predator Dynamics During a Multi-Strain Pandemic
Abstract
Small and large scale pandemics are a natural phenomenon repeatably appearing throughout history, causing ecological and biological shifts in ecosystems and a wide range of their habitats. These pandemics usually start with a single strain but shortly become multi-strain due to a mutation process of the pathogen causing the epidemic. In this study, we propose a novel eco-epidemiological model that captures multi-species prey-predator dynamics with a multi-strain pandemic. The proposed model extends and combines the Lotka-Volterra prey-predator model and the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered epidemiological model. We investigate the ecosystem's sensitivity and stability during such a multi-strain pandemic through extensive simulation relying on both synthetic cases as well as two real-world configurations. Our results are aligned with known ecological and epidemiological findings, thus supporting the adequacy of the proposed model in realistically capturing the complex eco-epidemiological properties of the multi-species multi-strain pandemic dynamics.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2305.00704,
title = {Multi-Species Prey-Predator Dynamics During a Multi-Strain Pandemic},
author = {Ariel Alexi and Ariel Rosenfeld and Teddy Lazebnik},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.00704},
year = {2025}
}