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Group defense in prey and hunting cooperation in predators are two important ecological phenomena and can occur concurrently. In this article, we consider cooperative hunting in generalist predators and group defense in prey under a mathematical framework to comprehend the enormous diversity the model could capture. To do so, we consider a modified Holling-Tanner model where we implement Holling type IV functional response to characterize grazing pattern of predators where prey species exhibit group defense. Additionally, we allow a modification in the attack rate of predators to quantify the hunting cooperation among them. The model admits three boundary equilibria and up to three coexistence equilibrium points. The geometry of the nontrivial prey and predator nullclines and thus the number of coexistence equilibria primarily depends on a specific threshold of the availability of alternative food for predators. We use linear stability analysis to determine the types of hyperbolic equilibrium points and characterize the non-hyperbolic equilibrium points through normal form and center manifold theory. Change in the model parameters leading to the occurrences of a series of local bifurcations from non-hyperbolic equilibrium points, namely, transcritical, saddle-node, Hopf, cusp and Bogdanov-Takens bifurcation; there are also occurrences of global bifurcations such as homoclinic bifurcation and saddle-node bifurcation of limit cycles. We observe two interesting closed 'bubble' form induced by global bifurcations due to change in the strength of hunting cooperation and the availability of alternative food for predators. A three dimensional bifurcation diagram, concerning the original system parameters, captures how the alternation in model formulation induces gradual changes in the bifurcation scenarios. Our model highlights the stabilizing effects of group or gregarious behaviour in both prey and predator, hence supporting the predator-herbivore regulation hypothesis. Additionally, our model highlights the occurrence of "saltatory equilibria" in ecological systems and capture the dynamics observed for lion-herbivore interactions.

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In this paper, we consider a stochastic two-species predator-prey system with modified Leslie-Gower. Meanwhile, we assume that hunting cooperation occurs in the predators. By using Itô formula and constructing a proper Lyapunov function, we first show that there is a unique global positive solution for any given positive initial value. Furthermore, based on Chebyshev inequality, the stochastic ultimate boundedness and stochastic permanence are discussed. Then, under some conditions, we prove the persistence in mean and extinction of system. Finally, we verify our results by numerical simulations.

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We investigate the dynamics of a prey-predator model with cooperative hunting among specialist predators and maturation delay in predator growth. First, we consider a model without delay and explore the effect of hunting time on the coexistence of predator and their prey. When the hunting time is long enough and the cooperation rate among predators is weak, prey and predator species tend to coexist. Furthermore, we observe the occurrences of a series of bifurcations that depend on the cooperation rate and the hunting time. Second, we introduce a maturation delay for predator growth and analyse its impact on the system's dynamics. We find that as the delay becomes larger, predator species become more likely to go extinct, as the long maturation delay hinders the growth of the predator population. Our numerical exploration reveals that the delay causes shifts in both the bifurcation curves and bifurcation thresholds of the non-delayed system.

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In this work, we propose a predator-prey system with a Holling type Ⅱ functional response and study its dynamics when the prey exhibits vigilance behavior to avoid predation and predators exhibit cooperative hunting. We provide conditions for existence and the local and global stability of equilibria. We carry out detailed bifurcation analysis and find the system to experience Hopf, saddle-node, and transcritical bifurcations. Our results show that increased prey vigilance can stabilize the system, but when vigilance levels are too high, it causes a decrease in the population density of prey and leads to extinction. When hunting cooperation is intensive, it can destabilize the system, and can also induce bi-stability phenomenon. Furthermore, it can reduce the population density of both prey and predators and also change the stability of a coexistence state. We provide numerical experiments to validate our theoretical results and discuss ecological implications.

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An intraguild predator-prey model including prey refuge and hunting cooperation is investigated in this paper. First, for the corresponding ordinary differential equation model, the existence and stability of all equilibria are given, and the existence of Hopf bifurcation, direction and stability of bifurcating periodic solutions are investigated. Then, for partial differential equation model, the diffusion-driven Turing instability is obtained. What is more, the existence and non-existence of the non-constant positive steady state of the reaction-diffusion model are established by the Leray-Schauder degree theory and some priori estimates. Next, some numerical simulations are performed to support analytical results. The results showed that prey refuge can change the stability of model and even have a stabilizing effect on this model, meanwhile the hunting cooperation can make such model without diffusion unstable, but make such model with diffusion stable. Lastly, a brief conclusion is concluded in the last section.

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In this paper, we have studied a fractional-order eco-epidemiological model incorporating fear, treatment, and hunting cooperation effects to explore the memory effect in the ecological system through Caputo-type fractional-order derivative. We have studied the behavior of different equilibrium points with the memory effect. The proposed system undergoes through Hopf bifurcation with respect to the memory parameter as the bifurcation parameter. We perform numerical simulations for different values of the memory parameter and some of model parameters. In the numerical results, it appears that the system is exhibiting a stable behavior from a period or chaotic nature with the increase in the memory effect. The system also exhibits two transcritical bifurcations with respect to the growth rate of the prey. At low values of prey's growth, all species go to extinction, at moderate values of prey's growth, only preys (susceptible and infected) can survive, and at higher values of prey's growth, all species survive simultaneously. The paper ended with some recommendations.

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Positive interactions are quite common in nature but are less studied. While positive association among species has been studied in ecological literature, how such interactions will impact the ecological dynamics when they occur within antagonist communities is not understood. Motivated by this, we studied a community module consisting of two prey species and a predator population where the prey species are in mutualistic relationship while the predators exhibit hunting cooperation. Our result reconfirms that both mutualism and hunting cooperation destabilizes the system. Predator cooperation may result in extinction of the relatively more attacked prey and a minimal mutualism strength is required in order to retain the coexistence equilibrium. A higher degree of cooperation among predators can lead to bistable dynamics which increases the survival chance of the otherwise extinct prey. Mutualistic association further enhances this effect thereby increasing the chance of coexistence. Generally, cooperative hunting is known to produce bistability but this system also demonstrated tristable dynamics. Moreover, the wide range of multi-stability exhibited by our model indicate the high sensitivity of the system to small perturbations. Overall, our study suggests that the interplay between the prey mutualism and predator cooperation may result in unintuitive dynamics which might be important in the context of community ecology.

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Social predators benefit from cooperation in the form of increased hunting success, but may be at higher risk of disease infection due to living in groups. Here, we use mathematical modeling to investigate the impact of disease transmission on the population dynamics benefits provided by group hunting. We consider a predator-prey model with foraging facilitation that can induce strong Allee effects in the predators. We extend this model by an infectious disease spreading horizontally and vertically in the predator population. The model is a system of three nonlinear differential equations. We analyze the equilibrium points and their stability as well as one- and two-parameter bifurcations. Our results show that weakly cooperating predators go unconditionally extinct for highly transmissible diseases. By contrast, if cooperation is strong enough, the social behavior mediates conditional predator persistence. The system is bistable, such that small predator populations are driven extinct by the disease or a lack of prey, and large predator populations survive because of their cooperation even though they would be doomed to extinction in the absence of group hunting. We identify a critical cooperation level that is needed to avoid the possibility of unconditional predator extinction. We also investigate how transmissibility and cooperation affect the stability of predator-prey dynamics. The introduction of parasites may be fatal for small populations of social predators that decline for other reasons. For invasive predators that cooperate strongly, biocontrol by releasing parasites alone may not be sufficient.

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