Spatial Predator-Prey Chaos
(Two Foxes Chasing a
Rabbit)
Vladimir Zhdankin and J. C. Sprott
Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin,
Madison,
WI 53706, USA
April 4, 2009
This animation shows the motion of two foxes
chasing a rabbit using the anti-Newtonian approximation (forces are
equal in magnitude and
direction). The foxes have
twice the mass of the rabbit and 1/3 of the friction. The force law is
1/R in two spatial dimensions, and the foxes do not interact. The
dynamics are chaotic with a largest
Lyapunov exponent of 0.1346 and a strange attractor in the
12-dimensional phase space.
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