Dynamics of a plankton community with delay and herd-taxis

The movements of the plankton in the ocean are driven by random diffusion and cognitive judgement with herd-taxis. In this paper, we formulate a phytoplankton–zooplankton model with time delay in the herd-taxis effect diffusion and homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions. The conditions to guarantee the existence of the coexistence equilibrium of the model are given. By analyzing the distribution of the eigenvalues of the characteristic equation, the local asymptotic stability of the coexistence equilibrium is achieved under certain condition. When there is no time delay in the herd-taxis effect, the model can possess the Turing bifurcation when we consider the nonlinear diffusion term, which leads to instability. When taking the time delay into account, the Hopf bifurcation occurs instead as the time delay varies. Furthermore, we investigate the situation without the fact of time, that is the steady-state bifurcation and the stability of bifurcating solution. Finally, the stability of the coexistence equilibrium, the Turing bifurcation and the Hopf bifurcation of the system are modeled by numerical simulation. The simulations shown are coordinated with the theoretical results which we arrive at in the former part of the paper. The results illustrate that the time delay in the herd-taxis effect of the zooplankton influence the dynamics of the plankton system.