| Abstract: |
| In many cases, the movement of species within a region depends on the availability of food and other resources necessary for its survival. Starvation-driven diffusion (SDD) is a dispersal strategy that increases the motility of biological organisms in unfavorable environments i.e., a species moves more frequently in search of food if resources are insufficient (Cho and Kim, 2013). In this study, the proposed model represents the dispersion of an invasive species undergoing SDD, where the free boundary represents the expanding front. We observed that the spreading-vanishing dichotomy, which holds in the random dispersal model (Zhou and Xiao, 2013), also holds in the model undergoing SDD. We also provided the range of estimates for the spreading speed of the free boundary during the spreading process. Finally, our results were compared with the results of the random dispersal model to investigate the advantages of this strategic dispersal with respect to survival in new environments i.e., the conditions that allowed the species undergoing SDD to spread and the random diffusers vanish were monitored. |
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