Starving predators survive together, but maybe only in math-land

Enlarge / Ferocious, right? (The lion Animoji in iOS 11.3.) (credit: Apple)

It is well-known that physicists believe that studying physics makes you qualified to carry out research in every field of scientific endeavor. Hence, there are physics journals and papers devoted to all manner of topics, including evolution and population dynamics. In fact, the mathematical toy models that physicists use are good at abstracting things like the relationship between species. So, they can yield insights into what characteristics may be important to understand their interactions.

In a paper that fits nicely into this category, researchers have shown that starvation can help stabilize populations of predators (and I mean stable somewhere above a population of zero).

Predator vs. predator

Imagine that you have an ecosystem where two predators are also mutual prey: lions will eat tigers, and tigers will eat lions, while tigers don't eat tigers, and lions don't eat lions. A simple model will allow the animals to move around, eat each other, and reproduce. After letting the model run for a certain amount of time, you can examine the population density of each species.

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