Modeling and analysis of a marine bacteriophage infection with latency period

In a previous paper [4] the authors proposed a simple model to describe the epidemics induced by bacteriophages in marine bacteria populations like cyanobacteria and heterotrophic bacteria where the environment is the thermoclinic layer of the sea within which bacteriophages and bacteria are assumed to be homogeneously distributed. The main model simpli cation was in modeling the latent period of infected bacteria in order to describe the model with three nonlinear ordinary di erential equations. However, modeling of the latent period by suitable delay terms looks to be biologically reasonable and mathematically challenging, the ndings of which can be interesting to compare with the outcomes of our previous model [4]. Hence, in the following we rst recall the biological justi cation for the model and then introduce the model itself comparing it with other models on the same topic. The experimental evidence of the bacteriophage infection of marine bacteria can be found, for example, in the papers by Sieburth [14], Moebus [11], Bergh et al. [3]; Proctor and Fuhrman [12]. It is