https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-025-06713-2
Regular Article
The effect of demographic stochasticity on predatory–prey oscillations
1
Department of Physics, Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences (IASBS), 45137-66731, Zanjan, Iran
2
Quantitative Life Sciences section, The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Strada Costiera 11, 34014, Trieste, Italy
a
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Received:
8
March
2025
Accepted:
1
August
2025
Published online:
21
August
2025
The ecological dynamics of interacting predator and prey populations can display sustained oscillations, as predicted by the Rosenzweig–MacArthur predator–prey model. The presence of demographic stochasticity, due to the finiteness of population sizes, alters the amplitude and frequency of these oscillations. Here, we present a method for characterizing the effects of demographic stochasticity on the limit cycle attractor of the Rosenzweig–MacArthur. We show that an angular Brownian motion well describes the frequency oscillations. In the vicinity of the bifurcation point, we obtain an analytical approximation for the angular diffusion constant. This approximation accurately captures the effect of demographic stochasticity across a range of parameter values.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-025-06713-2.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
