Acoustic Wind in a Hyperbolic Predator-Prey System

We address a hyperbolic model for prey-sensitive predators interacting with purely diffusive prey. We adopt the Cattaneo formulation for describing the predators' transport. Given the hyperbolicity, the long-lived short-wave patterns occur for sufficiently weak prey diffusivities. The main result is that the non-linear interplay of the short waves generically excites the slowly growing amplitude modulation for wide ranges of the model parameters. We have observed such a feature in the numerical experiments and support our conclusions with a short-wave asymptotic solution in the limit of vanishing prey diffusivity. Our reasoning relies on the so-called homogenized system that governs slow evolutions of the amplitudes of the short-wave parcels. It includes a term (called wind) which is absent in the original model and only comes from averaging over the short waves. It is the wind that (unlike any of the other terms!) is capable of exciting the instability and pumping the growth of solutions. There is quite a definite relationship between the predators' transport coefficients to be held for getting rid of the wind. Interestingly, this relationship had been introduced in prior studies of small-scale mosaics in the spatial distributions of some real-life populations.