Analysis of stability and bifurcation and design of optimal control for phytoplankton–zooplankton–fish model with additional food and fish harvesting

This paper investigates the dynamics of a four-dimensional plankton-fish system that contains three communities of plankton: non-toxic phytoplankton, toxic-producing phytoplankton, and zooplankton. The zooplankton consumes both non-toxic and toxic-producing phytoplankton. First, the positivity and boundedness of the solutions in the plankton-fish model are evaluated. Then, we derive the conditions for the existence of ecologically possible equilibria and their local and global asymptotic nature. Furthermore, we evaluate the criteria for the existence of Hopf-bifurcation and transcritical bifurcation. By applying Pontryagin’s maximum principle, we investigate the optimal control of fish harvesting, where fishing effort is taken as a control parameter. By using phase-space diagrams, time responses, bifurcation diagrams, and numerical analyses validate the theoretical results. The numerical results including maximum Lyapunov exponent verify chaotic dynamics of the system. We notice that a suitable choice of harvesting, phytoplankton growth rate, and additional food parameters can control the chaotic behavior of the presented model. The proposed novel mathematical model gives deeper insights to theoretical ecologists on how toxic-producing phytoplankton affects zooplankton and fish populations in aquatic systems. Furthermore, the proposed model is more appropriate for fish harvesting to maximize profit as well as species conversion in the presence of toxic phytoplankton.