MESSAI.iO

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75% confidence

This study investigates whether microbial communities function as cohesive units or loose collections by analyzing community coalescence in bacterial microcosms. The research demonstrates that interspecies interaction strength dictates the unit of selection, with moderate to strong interactions leading to community-level selection where one parental community outcompetes the other.

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What they did

Substrate
complex media

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Abstract

Abstract It has long been debated in ecology whether communities behave as cohesive units or as loose collections of independent species. Here, we study this question in the context of community coalescence, the mixing of previously isolated communities, using bacterial microcosm experiments combined with ecological modeling. Our results demonstrate that interspecies interaction strength determines whether communities or species are the units of selection during coalescence. When interactions are moderate to strong, one parental community consistently outcompetes the other, indicating community-level selection. In contrast, under weak interactions, species fates are uncorrelated and the two communities contribute equally to the coalesced outcome, indicating the absence of community-level selection. These patterns extend to communities derived from natural samples with greater taxonomic diversity and richness. Furthermore, we identify two distinct regimes underlying community-level selection in experiments with different media conditions: an emergent regime in which collective dynamics shape outcomes that cannot be predicted from species traits alone, and a top-down regime where dominant species determine the winning community. Together, these results reconcile conflicting observations on community-level selection during community coalescence by demonstrating that communities behave as cohesive units only when interactions are sufficiently strong.

Key findings

  • Strong to moderate interspecies interactions result in one parental community consistently outcompeting the other, confirming community-level selection.
  • Weak interspecies interactions lead to uncorrelated species fates and equal contribution from both communities, indicating an absence of community-level selection.
  • The identified patterns regarding interaction strength and selection units hold true for communities derived from natural samples with high taxonomic diversity.

Keywords

EcologySelection (genetic algorithm)UncorrelatedContext (archaeology)CommunityCoalescence (physics)

Identifiers

DOI
10.21203/rs.3.rs-8826570/v1
Journal
Research Square
Year
2026