Threshold of coexistence and critical behavior of a predator-prey cellular automaton

Abstract

We study a probabilistic cellular automaton to describe two population biology problems: the threshold of species coexistence in a predator-prey system and the spreading of an epidemic in a population. By carrying out time-dependent simulations we obtain the dynamic critical exponents and the phase boundaries (thresholds) related to the transition between an activestate, where prey and predators present a stable coexistence, and a prey absorbing state. The estimates for the critical exponents show that the transition belongs to the directed percolation universality class. In the limit where the cellular automaton maps into a model for the spreading of an epidemic with immunization we observe a crossover from directed percolation class to the dynamic percolation class. Patterns of growing clusters related to species coexistence and spreading of epidemic are shown and discussed.