Abstract
Many organisms live in habitats with limited nutrients or space, competition for these resources is ubiquitous. Although spatial factors related to the population’s manner of colonizing space influences its success in spatial competition, what these factors are and to what extent they influence the outcome remains underexplored. Here, we applied a simulated competitive model to explore the spatial factors affecting outcomes of competition for space. By quantifying spatial factors, we show that colonizing space in a more dispersed manner contributes to microbial competitive success. We also find that the competitive edge deriving from a more dispersed manner in colonization can compensate for the disadvantage arising from either a lower growth rate or lower initial abundance. These findings shed light on the role of space colonization manners on maintaining biodiversity within ecosystems and provide novel insights critical for understanding how competition for space drives evolutionary innovation.
Highlights
Competition is a ubiquitous phenomenon observed for both microorganisms and macro-organisms [1, 2]
The space competition of macroscopic organisms has been reported in many papers [2, 12]
Thanks to rapid advances in microscopy and high-throughput sequencing, microbial ecology has developed rapidly, which has contributed to the understanding of macroscopic communities
Summary
Competition is a ubiquitous phenomenon observed for both microorganisms and macro-organisms [1, 2]. Whether there are other abiotic factors that do not influence the population growth rates but will affect the outcome of microbial competition, remains to be elucidated. Understanding this question is critical to explain how slow-growing microbes compete against their fast-growing counter-partners and exist in all environments [26,27,28]. We constructed an individual-based model (named “BacGo”) to simulate two microbial populations competing for limiting space and explore the influence of spatially related factors on the competition for space.
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