Turing pattern formation in a three species model with generalist predator and cross-diffusion

In a natural ecosystem, specialist predators feed almost exclusively on one species of prey. But generalist predators feed on many types of species. Consequently, their dynamics is not coupled to the dynamics of a specific prey population. However, the defense of prey formed by congregating made the predator tend to move in the direction of lower concentration of prey species. This is described by cross-diffusion in a generalist predator-prey model. First, the positive equilibrium solution is globally asymptotically stable for the ODE system and for the reaction-diffusion system without cross-diffusion, respectively, hence it does not belong to the classical Turing instability scheme. But it becomes linearly unstable only when cross-diffusion also plays a role. This implies that cross-diffusion can lead to the occurrence and disappearance of the instability. Our results exhibit some interesting combining effects of cross-diffusion, predations and intra-species interactions. Furthermore, we consider the existence and non-existence results concerning non-constant positive steady states (patterns) of the system. We demonstrate that cross-diffusion can create non-constant positive steady-state solutions. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.