Global stability and Hopf bifurcation of a plankton model with time delay

A differential delay equation model with a discrete time delay and a distributed time delay is introduced to simulate zooplankton–nutrient interaction. The differential inequalities’ methods and standard Hopf bifurcation analysis are applied. Some sufficient conditions are obtained for persistence and for the global stability of the unique positive steady state, respectively. It was shown that there is a Hopf bifurcation in the model by using the discrete time delay as a bifurcation parameter.