Fear of predation may assert privilege to prey species by restricting their exposure to potential predators, meanwhile it can also impose costs by constraining the exploration of optimal resources. A predator–prey model with the effect of fear, refuge, and hunting cooperation has been investigated in this paper. The system’s equilibria are obtained and their local stability behavior is discussed. The existence of Hopf-bifurcation is analytically shown by taking refuge as a bifurcation parameter. There are many ecological factors which are not instantaneous processes, and so, to make the system more realistic, we incorporate three discrete time delays: in the effect of fear, refuge and hunting cooperation, and analyze the delayed system for stability and bifurcation. Moreover, for environmental fluctuations, we further modify the delayed system by incorporating seasonality in the fear, refuge and cooperation. We have analyzed the seasonally forced delayed system for the existence of a positive periodic solution. In the support of analytical results, some numerical simulations are carried out. Sensitivity analysis is used to identify parameters having crucial impacts on the ecological balance of predator–prey interactions. We find that the rate of predation, fear, and hunting cooperation destabilizes the system, whereas prey refuge stabilizes the system. Time delay in the cooperation behavior generates irregular oscillations whereas delay in refuge stabilizes an otherwise unstable system. Seasonal variations in the level of fear and refuge generate higher periodic solutions and bursting patterns, respectively, which can be replaced by simple 1-periodic solution if the cooperation and fear are also allowed to vary with time in the former and latter situations. Higher periodicity and bursting patterns are also observed due to synergistic effects of delay and seasonality. Our results indicate that the combined effects of fear, refuge and hunting cooperation play a major role in maintaining a healthy ecological environment.

Vector-borne disease malaria is transmitted to humans by arthropod vectors (mosquitoes) and contributes significantly to the global disease burden. TV and social media play a key role to disseminate awareness among people by broadcasting awareness programs. In this paper, a nonlinear model is formulated and analyzed in which cumulative number of advertisements through TV and social media is taken as dynamical variable that propagates awareness among people to control the prevalence of vector-borne disease. The human population is partitioned into susceptible, infected and aware classes, while the vector population is divided into susceptible and infected classes. Humans become infected and new cases arise when bitten by infected vectors (mosquitoes) and susceptible vectors get infected as they bite infected humans. The feasibility of equilibria is justified and their stability conditions are discussed. A crucial parameter, basic reproduction number, which measures the disease transmission potentiality is obtained. Bifurcation analysis is performed by varying the sensitive parameters, and it is found that the proposed system shows different kinds of bifurcations, such as transcritical bifurcation, saddle-node bifurcation and Hopf bifurcation, etc. The analysis of the model shows that reduction in vector population due to intervention of people of aware class would not efficiently reduce the infective cases, rather we have to minimize the transmission rates anyhow, to control the disease outbreak.

Depending on behavioral differences, reproductive capability and dependency, the life span of a species is divided mainly into two classes, namely immature and mature. In this paper, we have studied the dynamics of a predator–prey system considering stage structure in prey and the effect of predator-induced fear with two discrete time delays: maturation delay and fear response delay. We consider that predators cooperate during hunting of mature prey and also include its impact in fear term. The conditions for existence of different equilibria, their stability analysis are carried out for non-delayed system and bifurcation results are presented extensively. It is observed that the fear parameter has stabilizing effect whereas the cooperative hunting factor having destabilizing effect on the system via occurrence of supercritical Hopf-bifurcation. Further, we observe that the system exhibits backward bifurcation between interior equilibrium and predator free equilibrium and hence the situation of bi-stability occurs in the system. Thereafter, we differentiate the region of stability and instability in bi-parametric space. We have also studied the system’s dynamics with respect to maturation and fear response delay and observed that they also play a vital role in the system stability and occurrence of Hopf-bifurcation is shown with respect to both time delays. The system shows stability switching phenomenon and even higher values of fear response delay leads the system to enter in chaotic regime. The role of fear factor in switching phenomenon is discussed. Comprehensive numerical simulation and graphical presentation are carried out using MATLAB and MATCONT.

The media has a significant contribution in spreading awareness by broadcasting various programs about prevalent diseases in the society along with the role of providing information, feeding news and educating a large mass. In this paper, the effect of media programs promoting precautionary measures and sanitation practices to control the bacterial infection in the community is modeled and analyzed considering the number of media programs as a dynamical variable. In the modeling phenomena, human population is partitioned into three classes; susceptible, infected and recovered. The disease is supposed to spread by direct contact of susceptible with infected individuals and indirectly by the ingestion of bacteria present in the environment. The growth in the media programs is considered proportional to the size of infected population and the impact of these programs on the indirect disease transmission rate and bacteria shedding rate by infected individuals is also considered. The feasibility of equilibria and their stability conditions are obtained. Model analysis reveals that broadcasting media programs and increasing its effectiveness shrink the size of infected class and control the spread of disease to a large extent.