The Ecosystem Dynamics That Can Make or Break an Invasion
1 min read
Summary
MIT physicist Jeff Gore and colleagues have built artificial microbial ecosystems in the lab to study ecological questions that are hard to explore in the field.
In a paper published in 2022, they discovered that ecological communities undergo phase transitions when they contain a lot of species or when species interact strongly with one another.
This year, they reported in another paper that when they sent invasive species into their model ecosystems, they found that diversity alone exerted a strong force on whether the invader succeeded or failed.
When the scientists grew ecosystems with many different species, and the population sizes of those species fluctuated over time, invaders were far more likely to take hold.
The reason for this is not fully understood, but it could be that the swings open ecological niches for a new species.
