Connectivity keeping caterpillars and spiders in bipartite graphs with connectivity at most three

Abstract

A conjecture of Luo, Tian and Wu (2022) says that for every positive integer $k$ and every finite tree $T$ with bipartition $X$ and $Y$ (denote $t = \max\{|X|,|Y |\})$, every $k$-connected bipartite graph $G$ with $\delta(G) \geq k + t$ contains a subtree $T' \cong T$ such that $\kappa(G-V (T')) \geq k$. In this paper, we confirm this conjecture for caterpillars when $k=3$ and spiders when $k\leq 3$.