The traditional (top-down) approach

The classical way (in all books) is to present the Lotka-Volterra equations: $$ \begin{align*} \frac{dH}{dt} &= H(a - b L)\\ \frac{dL}{dt} &= - L(d - c H) \end{align*} $$

Here,

  • \( H \) is the number of preys
  • \( L \) the number of predators
  • \( a \), \( b \), \( d \), \( c \) are parameters
Most books quickly establish the model and then use considerable space on discussing the qualitative properties of this nonlinear system of ODEs (which cannot be solved)