Global dynamics of parasitism-competition systems with one host and multiple parasites

Population abundance of a two-patch chemostat system with asymmetric diffusion

This paper considers a two-patch chemostat system with asymmetric diffusion, which characterizes laboratory experiments and includes exploitable nutrients. Using dynamical system theory, we demonstrate global stability of the one-patch model, and show uniform persistence of the two-patch system, which leads to existence of a stable positive equilibrium. Analysis on the equilibrium demonstrates mechanisms by which varying the asymmetric diffusion can make the total population abundance in heterogeneous environments larger than that without diffusion, even larger than that in the corresponding homogeneous environments with or without diffusion. The mechanisms are shown to be effective even in source-sink populations. A novel finding of this work is that the asymmetry combined with high diffusion intensity can reverse the predictions of symmetric diffusion in previous studies, while intermediate asymmetry is shown to be favorable but extremely large or extremely small asymmetry is unfavorable. Our results are consistent with experimental observations and provide new insights. Numerical simulations confirm and extend the results.