Paper 1, Section I,
Part II, 2012
Krill is the main food source for baleen whales. The following model has been proposed for the coupled evolution of populations of krill and whales, with being the number of krill and being the number of whales:
where and are positive constants.
Give a biological interpretation for the form of the two differential equations.
Show that a steady state is possible with and and write down expressions for the steady-state values of and .
Determine whether this steady state is stable.