On permanence of all subsystems of competitive Lotka–Volterra systems with delays

In this paper, permanence for a class of competitive Lotka–Volterra systems is considered that have distributed delays and constant coefficients on interaction terms and have time dependent growth rate vectors with an asymptotic average. A computable necessary and sufficient condition is found for the permanence of all subsystems of the system and its small perturbations on the interaction matrix. This is a generalization from systems without delays to delayed systems of Ahmad and Lazer’s work on total permanence (S. Ahmad, A.C. Lazer, Average growth and total permanence in a competitive Lotka–Volterra system, Ann. Mat. 185 (2006) S47–S67). In addition to Ahmad and Lazer’s example showing that permanence does not imply total permanence, another example of permanent system is given having a non-permanent subsystem. As a particular case, a necessary and sufficient condition is given for all subsystems of the corresponding autonomous system to be permanent. As this condition does not rely on the delays, it actually shows the equivalence between such permanence of systems with delays and that of corresponding systems without delays. Moreover, this permanence property is still retained by systems as a small perturbation of the original system.