Abstract
When competitive exclusion between lineages and genetic adaptation within lineages occur on the same timescale, the two processes have the potential to interact. I use experimental microbial evolution where strains of a photosynthetic microbe that differ in their physiological response to CO2 enrichment are grown either alone or in communities for hundreds of generations under CO2 enrichment. After about 300 generations of growth, strains that experienced competition while adapting to environmental change are both less productive and less fit than corresponding strains that adapted to that same environmental change in the absence of competitors. In addition, I find that excluding competitors not only limits that strain's adaptive response to abiotic change, but also decreases community productivity; I quantify this effect using the Price equation. Finally, these data allow me to empirically test the common hypothesis that phytoplankton that are most able to take advantage of carbon enrichment in single-strain populations over the short term will increase in frequency within multi-strain communities over longer timescales.
Highlights
Microbes have short generation times and large population sizes, so that on the timescale of decades, microbial communities will respond to environmental change at multiple levels simultaneously
The results reported above indicate that single-strain communities with high fitness at elevated CO2, either at the beginning or at the end of evolution, are not the ones that systematically win competitions in rising or high CO2 environments
The main insight of this study is that strains with the least potential to adapt to a particular environment in the absence of competitors consistently make the best competitors in the face of that same environmental change when adaptation and competition can occur simultaneously
Summary
After about 300 generations of growth, strains that experienced competition while adapting to environmental change are both less productive and less fit than corresponding strains that adapted to that same environmental change in the absence of competitors. I find that excluding competitors limits that strain’s adaptive response to abiotic change, and decreases community productivity; I quantify this effect using the Price equation. These data allow me to empirically test the common hypothesis that phytoplankton that are most able to take advantage of carbon enrichment in single-strain populations over the short term will increase in frequency within multi-strain communities over longer timescales
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