School of the Environment, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Center for Frontier Research, National Institute of Genetics, Mishima, Japan.
Ecol Lett. 2024 Sep;27(9):e14507. doi: 10.1111/ele.14507.
The ability for microbes to enter dormant states is adaptive under resource fluctuations and has been linked to the maintenance of diversity. Nevertheless, the mechanism by which microbial dormancy gives rise to the density-dependent feedbacks required for stable coexistence under resource fluctuations is not well understood. Via analysis of consumer-resource models, we show that the stable coexistence of dormancy and non-dormancy strategists is a consequence of the former benefiting more from resource fluctuations while simultaneously reducing overall resource variability, which sets up the requisite negative frequency dependence. Moreover, we find that dormants can coexist alongside gleaner and opportunist strategies in a competitive-exclusion-defying case of three species coexistence on a single resource. This multi-species coexistence is typically characterised by non-simple assembly rules that cannot be predicted from pairwise competition outcomes. The diversity maintained via this three-way trade-off represents a novel phenomenon that is ripe for further theoretical and empirical inquiry.
微生物进入休眠状态的能力在资源波动下具有适应性，并与多样性的维持有关。然而，微生物休眠如何产生资源波动下稳定共存所需的密度依赖反馈的机制尚不清楚。通过对消费者-资源模型的分析，我们表明休眠和非休眠策略者的稳定共存是前者从资源波动中受益更多，同时减少整体资源变异性的结果，这为所需的负频率依赖性创造了条件。此外，我们发现，在单个资源上三种物种共存的竞争排斥情况下，休眠体可以与清道夫和机会主义策略共存。这种多物种共存的特点通常是由不能根据成对竞争结果预测的非简单组装规则决定的。通过这种三方权衡维持的多样性代表了一种新的现象，值得进一步的理论和经验研究。
