Modeling the immune system response: an application to leishmaniasis.

In this paper, we present a mathematical model of the immune response to parasites. The model is a type of predator-prey system in which the parasite serves as the prey and the immune response as the predator. The model idealizes the entire immune response as a single entity although it is comprised of several aspects. Parasite density is captured using logistic growth while the immune response is modeled as a combination of two components, activation by parasite density and an autocatalytic reinforcement process. Analysis of the equilibria of the model demonstrate bifurcations between parasites and immune response arising from the autocatalytic response component. The analysis also points to the steady states associated with disease resolution or persistence in leishmaniasis. Numerical predictions of the model when applied to different cases of Leishmania mexicana are in very close agreement with experimental observations.

Fishing Quotas, Induced Allee Effect, and Fluctuation-Driven Extinction.

We explore the potential of modifications to standard fishery models (for example Gordon-Schafer-Munro) to help understand events such as the collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery. In particular we find that quota-driven and similar harvesting strategies induce an effective strong Allee effect (collapse if the population falls below a critical level). In the presence of environmental noise, fish population dynamics is similar to a random walk with (non-linear) drift. The expected survival time (first passage time to collapse) is shown to depend sensitively upon the amount of environmental noise and size of the 'safe zone' between the deterministic steady state population and the critical population level at which the system collapses; more precisely it is exponential in the cube of the size of the safe zone divided by the variance of the noise process. Similar scaling can be expected for more survival in more general systems with multiple steady states. Our calculations imply an amplification effect under which small increases in harvest yield large decreases in expected survival time, and one should be cautious in changes in harvesting, especially in fisheries with poor or limited data and fisheries affected by climate change.

Thermal detection of a prevascular tumor embedded in breast tissue.

This paper presents a mathematical model of heat transfer in a prevascular breast tumor. The model uses the steady state temperature of the breast at the skin surface to determine whether there is an underlying tumor and if so, verifies whether the tumor is growing or dormant. The model is governed by the Pennes equations and we present numerical simulations for versions of the model in two and three dimensions.

Spatial effects and turing instabilities in the invasive species model.

This paper demonstrates that a recently proposed dynamical model for the ecology of Easter Island admits periodic and chaotic attractors, not previously reported. Such behavior may more realistically depict the population dynamics of general ecosystems and illustrates the power of simple models to produce the kind of complex behavior that is ubiquitous in such systems.

Rat instigated human population collapse on easter island.

In this paper we develop an invasive species differential equations model for the population collapse on Easter Island. This model, motivated by recent archaeological results of T. Hunt, allows us to examine the role of rats in the collapse. In Hunt's theory, the decline of resources was accelerated by Polynesian rats and not merely the result of the overuse by the island's human population. Hunt uses archaeological data which suggests a different timeline for the settlement and the long term population dynamics of Easter Island. Our goal is to estimate the plausibility of Hunt's hypothesis.

Dynamics of a discrete population model for extinction and sustainability in ancient civilizations.

We analyze a discrete version of a recently developed ratio dependent population-resource model. This model has been used to study the decline of the human and resource populations on Easter Island and the chaotic dynamics of moose and wolf populations in Canada. The dynamical system exhibits a rich behavior of fractal basins of attraction and a Neimark-Sacker bifurcation route to chaos. The model consists of a coupled pair of logistic equations, with the carrying capacity for the predators proportional to the number of prey.