Variation in thermal physiology can drive the temperature-dependence of microbial community richness
- Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity, Germany
- Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Abstract
Predicting how species diversity changes along environmental gradients is an enduring problem in ecology. In microbes current theories tend to invoke energy availability and enzyme kinetics as the main drivers of temperature-richness relationships. Here we derive a general empirically-grounded theory that can explain this phenomenon by linking microbial species richness in competitive communities to variation in the temperature-dependence of their interaction and growth rates. Specifically, the shape of the microbial community temperature-richness relationship depends on how rapidly the strength of effective competition between species pairs changes with temperature relative to the variance of their growth rates. Furthermore, it predicts that a thermal specialist-generalist tradeoff in growth rates alters coexistence by shifting this balance, causing richness to peak at relatively higher temperatures. Finally, we show that the observed patterns of variation in thermal performance curves of metabolic traits across extant bacterial taxa is indeed sufficient to generate the variety of community-level temperature-richness responses observed in the real world. Our results provide a new and general mechanism that can help explain temperature-diversity gradients in microbial communities, and provide a quantitative framework for interlinking variation in the thermal physiology of microbial species to their community-level diversity.
Data availability
The current manuscript is a computational study, so no data have been generated for this manuscript. Modelling code is avalible https://github.com/CleggTom/TempFeas
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Natural Environment Research Council (NERC QMEE Centre for Doctoral Training NE/P012345/1)
- Tom Clegg
- Samraat Pawar
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2024, Clegg & Pawar
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Variation in thermal physiology can drive the temperature-dependence of microbial community richness
eLife 13:e84662.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.84662
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