Abstract
In microbial communities, each species often has multiple, distinct phenotypes, but studies of ecological stability have largely ignored this subpopulation structure. Here, we show that such implicit averaging over phenotypes leads to incorrect linear stability results. We then analyze the effect of phenotypic switching in detail in an asymptotic limit and partly overturn classical stability paradigms: abundant phenotypic variation is linearly destabilizing but, surprisingly, a rare phenotype such as bacterial persisters has a stabilizing effect. Finally, we extend these results by showing how phenotypic variation modifies the stability of the system to large perturbations such as antibiotic treatments.
Highlights
In microbial communities, each species often has multiple, distinct phenotypes, but studies of ecological stability have largely ignored this subpopulation structure
Recent advances in our understanding of large natural microbial communities such as the human microbiome have emphasized the important link between stability and function: Adult individuals typically carry the same microbiome composition for long periods of time and disturbances thereof are often associated with disease [8,9,10]
While genetically identical organisms may exhibit different phenotypes [11,12,13,14] and despite the known ecological importance of phenotypic variation [15], studies of stability have largely ignored the existence of such subpopulations within species
Summary
Each species often has multiple, distinct phenotypes, but studies of ecological stability have largely ignored this subpopulation structure. Over 40 years ago, May suggested that equilibria of large ecological communities are overwhelmingly likely to be linearly unstable [1] His approach did not specify the details of the dynamical system that describes the full population dynamics, but rather assumed that the linearized dynamics near the fixed point were represented by a random Jacobian matrix. With stochastic switching between phenotypes as an example of subpopulation structure, we show that while multiple abundant phenotypes are destabilizing, a rare phenotype can be stabilizing Given Eqs. (2), they uniquely define an equilibrium A∗ and an averaged model of the form (1), and this A∗ is an equilibrium of this averaged model, and feasible if (B∗, C∗) is
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