A Fractional-Order Food Chain System Incorporating Holling-II Type Functional Response and Prey Refuge

A fractional-order three-species food chain ecosystem with prey refuge and Holling-II type functional response for predation is proposed and studied. Several sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of the solution of the fractional-order system are obtained. The boundedness of the solution of the system is proven. We investigate the asymptotic behavior of the model by using eigenvalue analysis, and some sufficient conditions on local asymptotic stability of the equilibrium points are given. Furthermore, the conditions for the occurrence of bifurcation at some equilibrium points are presented. We find that the order of the proposed fractional-order ecosystem is one of the parameters for its bifurcation. Several numerical simulations are provided to show the effectiveness of our findings in this paper. Lastly, some new numerical simulations are given to discuss the influence of the half-saturation constant, prey refuge coefficient and the order of fractional-order derivative on the stability of the discussed fractional-order system.