Analysis of a mathematical model arising from stage-structured predator-prey in a chemostat

In this article, we consider a 4-dimensional predator-prey chemostat model of nitrogen-phytoplankton-rotifer interactions with staged structure proposed by Blasius et al. (2020). Although it is still difficult to prove the simulation observations in Blasius et al. (2020) by mathematical arguments, we explore the dynamics in order to better understand the dynamical mechanism of cyclic persistence for this model. We firstly investigate the corre-sponding system without staged structure, i.e., when the juvenile is absent, the asymptotical behavior of the solutions is given. When the juvenile is present, a threshold condition for the uniform persistence of the 4-dimensional system is provided. Finally, by choosing the life development time delay as a bifurcation parameter, we show that the system admits periodic solutions near one semi-equilibrium undergoing Hopf bifurcation. The rigorous theoretical analytic work in this paper provides some helpful transient information between coherent oscillation and non-coherent oscillation described by the experimental data of Blasius et al. (2020).