Predator-prey interaction

The Lotka–Volterra equations, also known as the predator–prey equations, are a pair of first-order, nonlinear, differential equations frequently used to describe the dynamics of biological systems in which two species interact, one as a predator and the other as prey. The populations change through time according to the pair of equations:

where

The Lotka–Volterra system of equations is an example of a Kolmogorov model, which is a more general framework that can model the dynamics of ecological systems with predator–prey interactions, competition, disease, and mutualism.

The Lotka–Volterra predator–prey model was initially proposed by Alfred J. Lotka in the theory of autocatalytic chemical reactions in 1910. This was effectively the logistic equation, which was originally derived by Pierre François Verhulst. In 1920 Lotka extended, via Kolmogorov (see above), the model to "organic systems" using a plant species and a herbivorous animal species as an example and in 1925 he utilised the equations to analyse predator-prey interactions in his book on biomathematics. The same set of equations were published in 1926 by Vito Volterra, a mathematician and physicist who had become interested in mathematical biology. Volterra's enquiry was inspired through his interactions with the marine biologist Umberto D'Ancona who was courting his daughter at the time and later was to become his son-in-law. D'Ancona studied the fish catches in the Adriatic Sea and had noticed that the percentage of predatory fish caught had increased during the years of World War I (1914–18). This puzzled him as the fishing effort had been very much reduced during the war years. Volterra developed his model independently from Lotka and used it to explain d'Ancona's observation.

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