Warming-enhanced priority effects at population and community levels in aquatic bacteria

Abstract

The immigration history of communities can profoundly affect community composition. For instance, early-arriving species can have a lasting effect on community structure by reducing the immigration success of late-arriving ones through priority effects. Warming could possibly enhance priority effects by increasing growth rates of early-arriving bacteria. Here we implemented a full-factorial experiment with aquatic bacteria where both temperature and dispersal rate of a better-adapted community were manipulated to test their effects on the importance of priority effects, both on a community and a population level. Our results suggest that priority effects in aquatic bacteria might be primarily driven by niche preemption and strengthened by increasing temperature as warming increased the resistance of recipient communities against dispersal, and decreased the relative abundance of successfully established late-arriving bacteria. However, warming-enhanced priority effects were not always found and their strengths differed between recipient communities and dispersal rates. Nevertheless, our findings highlight the importance of context dependence of priority effects and the potential role of warming in mitigating the effects of invasion.