Ryan Monaghan

Rabbits
Mathematical Modeling Given an environment that is large enough and can supply enough food rabbits will produce at an alarming rate. Using mathematics we can create a model that will allow us to predict the population of rabbits at any given time. First lets make some assumptions: Our environment is infinitely large Our rabbits have an unlimited supply of food Our rabbits have a spring of eternal youth, so they never die There are no predators (for now)

Okay with these assumptions lets start. Because our rabbits never die we assume that they will continue to repopulate. So to begin lets create an equation that will tell us how to calculate the number of new rabbits after each breading cycle. That equation is:

Where is the number of new rabbits after a breeding cycle, is the number of old rabbits from previous breeding cycles, is a breading constant that remains the same throughout our experiment, and is the time step. Like we mentioned earlier our rabbits never die. So to get the total number of rabbits we use.

The size of will determine how fast our population grows. Here is are a few examples of different values for .

Rabbit Population VS Time

6000000 Rabbit Population 5000000 4000000 3000000 2000000 1000000 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 101112131415161718192021 Time m=1 m=1.1 m=.9

Ryan Monaghan

From the above graph we can see that small changes in can have drastic effects on the population of our rabbits. When modeling systems such as this much care is needed to find proper constants to model particular situations. This model has some faults, namely the fact that we know rabbits die. Our model does not yet incorporate this harsh fact of life. In order to do this we must introduce a new constant , which we will call the death constant. So for each time step some percentage of the old rabbits die off and dont repopulate. This can be show by the new equation.

From the equation above it may not be clear but must be between 0 and 1 the case in which signifies that no rabbits are dying and the case in which means that all the rabbits die instantly. So the smaller the quicker the rabbits die. It will be left to the reader to play around with the two constants to see how they affect other. One last possible modification that could be made to our system would be to add a population of predators. This addition adds a lot of complexity to our system. But some points to think about are: What happens if the predator population out grows the rabbits? What will happen to the predators? What happens to the prey? How would having too many rabbits and too few predators affect their respective populations? What if we made it so that the rabbits could fight back? How would this affect the relative populations? What other constraints could we introduce to our system that would make it more realistic?