Abstract
There is increasing awareness of invasion in microbial communities worldwide, but the mechanisms behind microbial invasions remain poorly understood. Specifically, we know little about how the evolutionary and ecological differences between invaders and natives regulate invasion success and impact. Darwin’s naturalization hypothesis suggests that the phylogenetic distance between invaders and natives could be a useful predictor of invasion, and modern coexistence theory proposes that invader-native niche and fitness differences combine to determine invasion outcome. However, the relative importance of phylogenetic distance, niche difference and fitness difference for microbial invasions has rarely been examined. By using laboratory bacterial microcosms as model systems, we experimentally assessed the roles of these differences for the success of bacterial invaders and their impact on native bacterial community structure. We found that the phylogenetic distance between invaders and natives failed to explain invasion success and impact for two of three invaders at the phylogenetic scale considered. Further, we found that invasion success was better explained by invader-native niche differences than relative fitness differences for all three invaders, whereas invasion impact was better explained by invader-native relative fitness differences than niche differences. These findings highlight the utility of considering modern coexistence theory to gain a more mechanistic understanding of microbial invasions.
Highlights
Structure and functioning of native communities [9]
For both B. cereus and S. pasteuri, niche differences (ND) and Relative fitness differences (RFD) were unrelated to phylogenetic distance (PD) (OLS regression: df = 6, R2 < 0.10, P > 0.40; Fig. 3)
The three invaders differed in their relationship between mean phylogenetic distance (MPD) and invasion impact
Summary
Structure and functioning of native communities [9]. Identifying the mechanisms of invasion in microbial communities has become an important objective of microbial community ecology [10, 11]. The rationale behind the hypothesis is that the invaders and their closely related natives [i.e., low invader-native phylogenetic distance (PD)] tend to occupy a Success b c Another framework that integrates species’ ecological differences into the study of invasion is modern coexistence theory, which suggests that invader-native niche and fitness differences combine to determine invasion outcomes [25, 26]. Building on previous work that applied modern coexistence theory to plants and algae [29, 30, 33, 34], we aimed to determine what aspects of invader-native evolutionary and ecological differences (i.e., PD, ND, and RFD) have stronger influences on bacterial invasion success and impact
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