ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Stabilization of extensive fine-scale diversity by ecologically driven spatiotemporal chaos.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 41 papers.
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41 citing papers in PubMed.
- Extreme pollution reshapes microbial community assembly in a tropical urban river.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2026Article
- The network structure of cross-feeding impacts microbial community diversity under growth-inhibiting stresses.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Emergent frequency-dependent selection predicts mutation outcomes in complex ecological communities.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Fluctuating Growth Rates Link Turnover and Unevenness in Species-Rich Communities.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Interplay of structured and random interactions in complex ecosystems dynamics.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Macroecological Laws Can Naturally Arise from Chaotic Internal Species Dynamics.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- A minimal model of panimmunity maintenance by horizontal gene transfer in the ecological dynamics of bacteria and phages.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Deciphering and steering population-level response under spatial drug heterogeneity on microhabitat structures.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Trait-space patterning is dictated by the tempo and mode of mutation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Paradox of the Sub-Plankton: Plausible Mechanisms and Open Problems Underlying Strain-Level Diversity in Microbial Communities.Environmental microbiology · 2025Review
- Turbulent mixing controls fixation of growing antagonistic populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Microbial functional guilds respond cohesively to rapidly fluctuating environments.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Landscape and environmental heterogeneity support coexistence in competitive metacommunities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Phase Transition to Chaos in Complex Ecosystems with Nonreciprocal Species-Resource Interactions.Physical review letters · 2024Article
- Chaotic turnover of rare and abundant species in a strongly interacting model community.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Tipping points emerge from weak mutualism in metacommunities.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Phase transition to chaos in complex ecosystems with non-reciprocal species-resource interactions.ArXiv · 2024Article
- Emergent competition shapes top-down versus bottom-up control in multi-trophic ecosystems.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Lytic and temperate phage naturally coexist in a dynamic population model.The ISME journal · 2024Article
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It has recently become apparent that the diversity of microbial life extends far below the species level to the finest scales of genetic differences. Remarkably, extensive fine-scale diversity can coexist spatially. How is this diversity stable on long timescales, despite selective or ecological differences and other evolutionary processes? Most work has focused on stable coexistence or assumed ecological neutrality. We present an alternative: extensive diversity maintained by ecologically driven spatiotemporal chaos, with no assumptions about niches or other specialist differences between strains. We study generalized Lotka-Volterra models with antisymmetric correlations in the interactions inspired by multiple pathogen strains infecting multiple host strains. Generally, these exhibit chaos with increasingly wild population fluctuations driving extinctions. But the simplest spatial structure, many identical islands with migration between them, stabilizes a diverse chaotic state. Some strains (subspecies) go globally extinct, but many persist for times exponentially long in the number of islands. All persistent strains have episodic local blooms to high abundance, crucial for their persistence as, for many, their average population growth rate is negative. Snapshots of the abundance distribution show a power law at intermediate abundances that is essentially indistinguishable from the neutral theory of ecology. But the dynamics of the large populations are much faster than birth-death fluctuations. We argue that this spatiotemporally chaotic "phase" should exist in a wide range of models, and that even in rapidly mixed systems, longer-lived spores could similarly stabilize a diverse chaotic phase.
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