Unknown

Dataset Information

0

Community-level cohesion without cooperation.


ABSTRACT: Recent work draws attention to community-community encounters ('coalescence') as likely an important factor shaping natural ecosystems. This work builds on MacArthur's classic model of competitive coexistence to investigate such community-level competition in a minimal theoretical setting. It is shown that the ability of a species to survive a coalescence event is best predicted by a community-level 'fitness' of its native community rather than the intrinsic performance of the species itself. The model presented here allows formalizing a macroscopic perspective whereby a community harboring organisms at varying abundances becomes equivalent to a single organism expressing genes at different levels. While most natural communities do not satisfy the strict criteria of multicellularity developed by multi-level selection theory, the effective cohesion described here is a generic consequence of resource partitioning, requires no cooperative interactions, and can be expected to be widespread in microbial ecosystems.

SUBMITTER: Tikhonov M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4946899 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

altmetric image

Publications

Community-level cohesion without cooperation.

Tikhonov Mikhail M  

eLife 20160616


Recent work draws attention to community-community encounters ('coalescence') as likely an important factor shaping natural ecosystems. This work builds on MacArthur's classic model of competitive coexistence to investigate such community-level competition in a minimal theoretical setting. It is shown that the ability of a species to survive a coalescence event is best predicted by a community-level 'fitness' of its native community rather than the intrinsic performance of the species itself. Th  ...[more]

Similar Datasets

| S-EPMC6030547 | biostudies-literature
| S-EPMC4404356 | biostudies-literature
| S-EPMC4108125 | biostudies-literature
| S-EPMC7011051 | biostudies-literature
| S-EPMC7115229 | biostudies-literature
| S-EPMC5004815 | biostudies-literature
| S-EPMC8601617 | biostudies-literature
| S-EPMC7822919 | biostudies-literature
| S-EPMC6070507 | biostudies-literature
| S-EPMC7610452 | biostudies-literature