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.
Article and author information
Author details
Reviewing Editor
- Carl T Bergstrom, University of Washington, United States
Version history
- Received: March 2, 2016
- Accepted: June 10, 2016
- Accepted Manuscript published: June 16, 2016 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: July 15, 2016 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2016, Tikhonov
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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