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Emergence of evolutionarily stable communities through eco-evolutionary tunnelling

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 2, pages 1644–1653 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Ecological and evolutionary dynamics of communities are inexorably intertwined. The ecological state determines the fate of newly arising mutants, and mutations that increase in frequency can reshape the ecological dynamics. Evolutionary game theory and its extensions within adaptive dynamics have been the mathematical frameworks for understanding this interplay, leading to notions such as evolutionarily stable states (ESS) in which no mutations are favoured, and evolutionary branching points near which the population diversifies. A central assumption behind these theoretical treatments has been that mutations are rare so that the ecological dynamics has time to equilibrate after every mutation. A fundamental question is whether qualitatively new phenomena can arise when mutations are frequent. Here, we describe an adaptive diversification process that robustly leads to complex ESS, despite the fact that such communities are unreachable through a step-by-step evolutionary process. Rather, the system as a whole tunnels between collective states over a short timescale. The tunnelling rate is a sharply increasing function of the rate at which mutations arise in the population. This makes the emergence of ESS communities virtually impossible in small populations, but generic in large ones. Moreover, communities emerging through this process can spatially spread as single replication units that outcompete other communities. Overall, this work provides a qualitatively new mechanism for adaptive diversification and shows that complex structures can generically evolve even when no step-by-step evolutionary path exists.

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Fig. 1: Evolution of antibiotic interactions leads to robust emergence of ESCs that are unreachable through adaptive dynamics.
Fig. 2: ESCs emerge abruptly through eco-evolutionary tunnelling whose rate scales superlinearly with mutation rate and population size.
Fig. 3: Pathways of ESC emergence.
Fig. 4: Different types of eco-evolutionary tunnelling transitions from one-strain to three-strain communities.
Fig. 5: Accelerated emergence and spread of ESC in spatially extended systems.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Simons Foundation, Targeted Grant in the Mathematical Modeling of Living Systems Award 342039 and National Science Foundation Grant DEB 1457518. This research was performed using the compute resources and assistance of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for High Throughput Computing in the Department of Computer Sciences. We thank S. A. Levin and D. Weissman for insightful discussions.

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  1. Department of Bacteriology and Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Seyfullah Enes Kotil & Kalin Vetsigian

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S.E.K. and K.V. designed the study, analysed the data, performed the simulations and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Kalin Vetsigian.

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Kotil, S.E., Vetsigian, K. Emergence of evolutionarily stable communities through eco-evolutionary tunnelling. Nat Ecol Evol 2, 1644–1653 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0655-7

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