Biodiversity and vulnerability in a 3D mutualistic system

Abstract

In this paper we study a three dimensional mutualistic model of two plants in competition and a pollinator with cooperative relation with plants. We compare the dynamical properties of this system with the associated one under absence of the pollinator. We observe how cooperation is a common fact to increase biodiversity, which it is known that, generically, holds for general mutualistic dynamical systems in Ecology as introduced in [4]. We also give mathematical evidence on how a cooperative species induces an increased biodiversity, even if the species is push to extinction. For this fact, we propose a necessary change in the model formulation which could explain this kind of phenomenon.