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Abstract

Extremophiles employ a diverse array of resistance strategies to thrive under harsh 18 environmental conditions but maintaining these adaptations comes at an energetic cost. If energy reserves to drop too low, extremophiles may enter a dormant state of reduced 20 metabolic activity to survive. Dormancy is frequently offered as a plausible explanation for the persistence of bacteria under suboptimal environmental conditions with the 22 prevalence of this mechanism only expected to rise as stressful conditions intensify. We estimated dormancy in ten hypersaline and freshwater lakes across the Western United 24States. To our surprise, we found that extreme environmental conditions did not induce higher levels of bacterial dormancy. Based on our approach using rRNA:rDNA gene 26 ratios to estimate activity, halophilic and halotolerant bacteria were classified as inactive at a similar percentage as freshwater bacteria, and the proportion of the community 28 exhibiting dormancy was considerably lower (16%) in hypersaline than freshwater lakes across a range of cutoffs estimating activity. Of the multiple chemical characteristics we 30 evaluated, salinity and, to a lesser extent, total phosphorus concentrations influenced activity. But instead of dormancy being more common as stressful conditions intensified, 32 the percentage of the community residing in an inactive state decreased with increasing salinity in freshwater and hypersaline lakes, suggesting that salinity acts as a strong 34 environmental filter selecting for bacteria that persist and thrive under saltier conditions. Within the compositionally distinct and less diverse hypersaline communities, abundant 36 taxa were disproportionately active and localized in families Microbacteriaceae