Mathematical modeling study demonstrates mechanistic diffusion dynamics in stochastic predator-prey systems, indicating that coupled predation drives negative cross-covariance and finite extinction.
Many stochastic predator–prey models introduce independent diagonal noise at the stochastic level. Such formulations are useful phenomenological models, but they do not explicitly encode the event-level coupling created by predation and biomass conversion. We derive an absorbed, fully mechanistic diffusion approximation and its extinction structure from a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) on N02 with four reaction channels: prey birth, prey competition death, predator death and a coupled predation–conversion event. Absorbing coordinate axes are imposed to represent the irreversibility of demographic extinction. Under Kurtz density-dependent scaling, the law-of-large-number (LLN) limit recovers the classical Rosenzweig–MacArthur (RM) ordinary differential equation, while central-limit scaling yields a chemical-Langevin diffusion with explicit drift and full state-dependent covariance. A direct consequence of the coupled predation–conversion event is the negative cross-covariance Σ12(N,P)=−mNP/(1+N) induced solely by the predation–conversion increment (−1,1). We define a stopped-and-frozen Itô diffusion up to the first boundary hit and establish strong well-posedness, non-explosion and moment bounds under this convention. Extinction has positive probability from every interior state, and the first boundary-hitting time is almost surely finite when m≤c.
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Yu et al. (2026) studied this question.
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