Journal
JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL BIOLOGY
Volume 314, Issue -, Pages 120-129Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS LTD- ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2012.08.013
Keywords
Chemostat; Demographic noise; Fluctuations; Microbial ecology; Power spectrum
Categories
Funding
- Leverhulme Trust [F/00158/BX]
- EPSRC [EP/E030173]
- Royal Society of Edinburgh
- Royal Society University Research Fellowship
- Darwin Trust
- EPSRC [EP/J007404/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EP/J007404/1] Funding Source: researchfish
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Predicting and controlling the behaviour of microbial ecosystems demands a fundamental understanding of the factors controlling their dynamics. In the natural environment microbes typically live in small local populations with limited and unpredictable nutrient supply and high death rates. Here, we show that these conditions can produce oscillations in microbial population dynamics, even for a single population. For a large population, with deterministic growth dynamics, our model predicts transient (damped) oscillations. For a small population, demographic noise causes these oscillations to be sustained indefinitely. We show that the same mechanism can produce sustained stochastic oscillations in a two-species, nutrient-cycling microbial ecosystem. Our results suggest that oscillatory population dynamics may be a common feature of small microbial populations in the natural environment, even in the absence of complex interspecies interactions or spatial structuring. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available