Dynamic behaviors of a delay differential equation model of plankton allelopathy (Q2370686)

This paper deals with an \(n\)-species competition model formulated as a non-autonomous nonlinear system of delaye differential equations with distributed delays. The model includes the effect of toxic substances as well as the effect of periodic time-dependent environmental changes. The mathematical analysis of this model starts with the work \textit{Z. Jin} and \textit{Z. E. Ma} [Comput. Math. Appl. 44, 491--500 (2002; Zbl 1094.34542)] in which sufficient conditions are established to guarantee the existence of at least one positive periodic solution, but restricted to the case of two populations and periodic coefficients. The paper concentrates on the following three issues: permanence, global attractivity and extinction of positive solutions. The permanence of the system, including the periodic case, is obtained as a consequence of well known results on differential inequalities. A corollary concerns the existence of a periodic positive solution to the system, which supplements the results of Jin and Ma. By constructing suitable Lyapunov functionals, the global attractivity of positive solutions is established, assuming a set of sufficient conditions for the parameters of the model. The last part of the paper is restricted to the case of two populations. Under some technical conditions on the coefficients of the system, it is proved that one of the populations is driven to extinction and the other one tends to the unique solution to a non-autonomous logistic equation. The arguments used are an adaptation of the underlying ideas in \textit{Z. Li} and \textit{F. D. Chen} [Appl. Math. Comput. in press] and \textit{F. M. De Oca} and \textit{M. Vivas} [Nonlinear Anal. Real World Appl. 7, No. 5, 1042--1047 (2006; Zbl 1122.34058)]. The work includes a final section with two artificial examples, which do not originate in real populations but whose goal is to show the feasibility of the several technical hypotheses imposed throughout the work.