Cross-diffusion induced Turing instability for a three species food chain model

In this paper, we study a strongly coupled reaction–diffusion system describing three interacting species in a food chain model, where the third species preys on the second one and simultaneously the second species preys on the first one. We first show that the unique positive equilibrium solution is globally asymptotically stable for the corresponding ODE system. The positive equilibrium solution remains linearly stable for the reaction–diffusion system without cross-diffusion, hence it does not belong to the classical Turing instability scheme. We further proved that the positive equilibrium solution is globally asymptotically stable for the reaction–diffusion system without cross-diffusion by constructing a Lyapunov function. But it becomes linearly unstable only when cross-diffusion also plays a role in the reaction–diffusion system, hence the instability is driven solely from the effect of cross-diffusion. Our results also exhibit some interesting combining effects of cross-diffusion, intra-species competitions and inter-species interactions.