Competition–colonization dynamics in experimental bacterial metacommunities

Livingston, George; Matias, Miguel G.; Calcagno, Vincent; Barbera, Claire; Combe, Marine; Leibold, Mathew A.; Mouquet, Nicolas

doi:10.1038/ncomms2239

Cited by 77 publications

(73 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…If cells are nonmotile, then spreading is achieved by growth itself, and there is essentially a single selection pressure for faster growth (34). However, motile cells may face a trade-off between growth and motility, which can sustain coexistence (36). Thus, crowding avoidance and dispersal can lead to similar selection pressures and ecological consequences.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crowded growth leads to the spontaneous evolution of semistable coexistence in laboratory yeast populations

Frenkel

McDonald

Dyken

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Identifying the mechanisms that create and maintain biodiversity is a central challenge in biology. Stable diversification of microbial populations often requires the evolution of differences in resource utilization. Alternatively, coexistence can be maintained by specialization to exploit spatial heterogeneity in the environment. Here, we report spontaneous diversification maintained by a related but distinct mechanism: crowding avoidance. During experimental evolution of laboratory Saccharomyces cerevisiae populations, we observed the repeated appearance of "adherent" (A) lineages able to grow as a dispersed film, in contrast to their crowded "bottomdweller" (B) ancestors. These two types stably coexist because dispersal reduces interference competition for nutrients among kin, at the cost of a slower maximum growth rate. This tradeoff causes the frequencies of the two types to oscillate around equilibrium over the course of repeated cycles of growth, crowding, and dispersal. However, further coevolution of the A and B types can perturb and eventually destroy their coexistence over longer time scales. We introduce a simple mathematical model of this "semistable" coexistence, which explains the interplay between ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Because crowded growth generally limits nutrient access in biofilms, the mechanism we report here may be broadly important in maintaining diversity in these natural environments.experimental evolution | coexistence | fungal adherence | crowding

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crowded growth leads to the spontaneous evolution of semistable coexistence in laboratory yeast populations

Frenkel

McDonald

Dyken

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Theory demonstrates that spatial (Chesson 2000) and temporal (Duthie et al 2014) resource fluctuations can lead to coexistence on a local scale, but no tactical models exist to predict their effect on the dynamics of specific ephemeral patch systems. Ideally, such models could be applied to communities amenable to experimental manipulation or long-term observation, as has been done for competition-colonization dynamics at a regional scale (e.g., Livingston et al 2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trade-Offs and Coexistence in Fluctuating Environments: Evidence for a Key Dispersal-Fecundity Trade-Off in Five Nonpollinating Fig Wasps

Duthie

Abbott

Nason

2015

The American Naturalist

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. abstract: The ecological principle of competitive exclusion states that species competing for identical resources cannot coexist, but this principle is paradoxical because ecologically similar competitors are regularly observed. Coexistence is possible under some conditions if a fluctuating environment changes the competitive dominance of species. This change in competitive dominance implies the existence of trade-offs underlying species' competitive abilities in different environments. Theory shows that fluctuating distance between resource patches can facilitate coexistence in ephemeral patch competitors, given a functional trade-off between species dispersal ability and fecundity. We find evidence supporting this trade-off in a guild of five ecologically similar nonpollinating fig wasps and subsequently predict local among-patch species densities. We also introduce a novel colonization index to estimate relative dispersal ability among ephemeral patch competitors. We suggest that a dispersal ability-fecundity trade-off and spatiotemporally fluctuating resource availability commonly co-occur to drive population dynamics and facilitate coexistence in ephemeral patch communities.

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“…, ; Livingston et al . ). Specifically, they allow the identification of causalities and bridging the gap between the complexity of natural systems and the level of abstraction inherent to all theoretical models (Holyoak & Lawler ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Inferring species interactions in ecological communities: a comparison of methods at different levels of complexity

et al. 2015

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Summary1. Natural communities commonly contain many different species and functional groups, and multiple types of species interactions act simultaneously, such as competition, predation, commensalism or mutualism. However, experimental and theoretical investigations have generally been limited by focusing on one type of interaction at a time or by a lack of a common methodological and conceptual approach to measure species interactions. 2. We compared four methods to measure and express species interactions. These approaches are, with increasing degree of model complexity, an extinction-based model, a relative yield model and two generalized Lotka-Volterra (LV) models. All four approaches have been individually applied in different fields of community ecology, but rarely integrated. We provide an overview of the definitions, assumptions and data needed for the specific methods and apply them to empirical data by experimentally deriving the interaction matrices among 11 protist and rotifer species, belonging to three functional groups. Furthermore, we compare their advantages and limitations to predict multispecies community dynamics and ecosystem functioning. 3. The relative yield method is, in terms of final biomass production, the best method in predicting the 11-species community dynamics from the pairwise competition experiments. The LV model, which is considering equilibrium among the species, suffers from experimental constraints given the strict equilibrium assumption, and this may be rarely satisfied in ecological communities. 4. We show how simulations of a LV stochastic community model, derived from an empirical interaction matrix, can be used to predict multispecies community dynamics across multiple functional groups. 5. Our work unites available tools to measure species interactions under one framework. This improves our ability to make management-oriented predictions of species coexistence/extinction and to compare ecosystem processes across study systems.

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Competition–colonization dynamics in experimental bacterial metacommunities

Cited by 77 publications

References 60 publications

Crowded growth leads to the spontaneous evolution of semistable coexistence in laboratory yeast populations

Crowded growth leads to the spontaneous evolution of semistable coexistence in laboratory yeast populations

Trade-Offs and Coexistence in Fluctuating Environments: Evidence for a Key Dispersal-Fecundity Trade-Off in Five Nonpollinating Fig Wasps

Inferring species interactions in ecological communities: a comparison of methods at different levels of complexity

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