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Structured environments foster competitor coexistence by manipulating interspecies interfaces
(PLOS, 2021-01) Ursell, Tristan
Natural environments, like soils or the mammalian gut, frequently contain microbial consor- tia competing within a niche, wherein many species contain genetically encoded mecha- nisms of interspecies competition. Recent computational work suggests that physical structures in the environment can stabilize local competition between species that would otherwise be subject to competitive exclusion under isotropic conditions. Here we employ Lotka-Volterra models to show that interfacial competition localizes to physical structures, stabilizing competitive ecological networks of many species, even with significant differ- ences in the strength of competitive interactions between species. Within a limited range of parameter space, we show that for stable communities the length-scale of physical structure inversely correlates with the width of the distribution of competitive fitness, such that physi- cal environments with finer structure can sustain a broader spectrum of interspecific compe- tition. These results highlight the potentially stabilizing effects of physical structure on microbial communities and lay groundwork for engineering structures that stabilize and/or select for diverse communities of ecological, medical, or industrial utility.