Microbial Response to Natural Disturbances: Rare Biosphere often plays a role

Abstract

Understanding how microbial populations respond to disturbances represents a major goal for microbial ecology. While several theories have been advanced to explain microbial community compositional changes in response to disturbances, appropriate data to test these theories is scarce, especially when considering the challenges to define rare vs. abundant taxa and generalists vs. specialists, a prerequisite for testing the theories. Here, we define these two key concepts by employing the patterns of coverage of a (target) genome by a metagenome to define rare populations, and by borrowing concepts from macroecology, the proportional similarity index (PS index), to define generalists. Using these concepts, we found that coastal microbial communities are resilient to major perturbations such as tropical cyclones and (uncommon) cold or warm weather events snaps-in part-due to the response of rare populations, providing support for the insurance hypothesis (i.e., the rare biosphere has the buffering capacity to mitigate the effects of disturbances). Generalists appear to contribute proportionally more than specialists to community adaptation to perturbations like warming, supporting the disturbance-specialization hypothesis, i.e., disturbance favors generalists. Taken together, our results advance understanding of the mechanisms governing microbial populations dynamics under changing environmental conditions and have potential applications for ecosystem management.