title: The stochastic modelling of kleptoparasitism using a Markov process.
abstract: Kleptoparasitism, the stealing of food items from other animals, is a common behaviour observed across a huge variety of species, and has been subjected to significant modelling effort. Most such modelling has been deterministic, effectively assuming an infinite population, although recently some important stochastic models have been developed. In particular the model of Yates and Broom (Stochastic models of kleptoparasitism. J. Theor. Biol. 248 (2007), 480-489) introduced a stochastic version following the original model of Ruxton and Moody (The ideal free distribution with kleptoparasitism. J. Theor. Biol. 186 (1997), 449-458), and whilst they generated results of interest, they did not solve the model explicitly. In this paper, building on methods used already by van der Meer and Smallegange (A stochastic version of the Beddington-DeAngelis functional response: Modelling interference for a finite number of predators. J. Animal Ecol. 78 (2009) 134-142) we give an exact solution to the distribution of the population over the states for the Yates and Broom model and investigate the effects of some key biological parameters, especially for small populations where stochastic models can be expected to differ most from their deterministic equivalents.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Mathematical Science, City University, Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB, UK. mark.broom.1@city.ac.uk
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Broom
authors.forename: Mary L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Crowe
authors.forename: Meghan R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Fitzgerald
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rychtár
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D017753:Ecosystem; D008390:Markov Chains; D008954:Models, Biological; D011156:Population Density; D011157:Population Dynamics; D011235:Predatory Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D013269:Stochastic Processes