On a kinetic description of Lotka-Volterra dynamics

G. Toscani, M. Zanella

Rivista di Matematica della Università di Parma, in press. (Preprint arXiv)

Owing to the analogies between the problem of wealth redistribution with taxation in a multi-agent society, we introduce and discuss a kinetic model describing the statistical distributions in time of the sizes of groups of biological systems with prey-predator dynamics.

While the evolution of the mean values is shown to be driven by a classical Lotka-Volterra system of differential equations, it is shown that the time evolution of the probability distributions of the size of groups of the two interacting species is heavily dependent both on a kinetic redistribution operator and the degree of randomness present in the system. Numerical experiments are given to clarify the time-behavior of the distributions of groups of the species.