Community-level cohesion without cooperation

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Tikhonov, Mikhail. 2016. “Community-level cohesion without cooperation.” eLife 5 (1): e15747. doi:10.7554/eLife.15747. http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.15747.Abstract
Recent work draws attention to community-community encounters ('coalescence') as likely an important factor shaping natural ecosystems. This work builds on MacArthur’s classic model of competitive coexistence to investigate such community-level competition in a minimal theoretical setting. It is shown that the ability of a species to survive a coalescence event is best predicted by a community-level 'fitness' of its native community rather than the intrinsic performance of the species itself. The model presented here allows formalizing a macroscopic perspective whereby a community harboring organisms at varying abundances becomes equivalent to a single organism expressing genes at different levels. While most natural communities do not satisfy the strict criteria of multicellularity developed by multi-level selection theory, the effective cohesion described here is a generic consequence of resource partitioning, requires no cooperative interactions, and can be expected to be widespread in microbial ecosystems. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.15747.001Other Sources
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4946899/pdf/Terms of Use
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