Temporal changes in species interactions in simple aquatic bacterial communities

• Main Authors: Pekkonen Minna, Laakso Jouni T
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: BMC 2012-09-01
• Series: BMC Ecology
• Online Access: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6785/12/18

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Organisms modify their environment and in doing so change the quantity and possibly the quality of available resources. Due to the two-way relationship between organisms and their resource environment, and the complexity it brings to biological communities, measuring species interactions reliably in any biological system is a challenging task. As the resource environment changes, the intensity and even the sign of interactions may vary in time. We used <it>Serratia marcescens</it> and <it>Novosphingobium capsulatum</it> bacteria to study how the interaction between resource environment and organisms influence the growth of the bacterial species during circa 200 generations. We used a sterile-filtering method to measure how changes in resource environment are reflected in growth rates of the two species.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Changes in the resource environment caused complex time and species composition-dependent effects on bacterial growth performance. Variation in the quality of the growth medium indicated existence of temporally fluctuating within-species facilitation and inhibition, and between-species asymmetric facilitation.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The interactions between the community members could not be fully predicted based only on the knowledge of the growth performance of each member in isolation. Growth dynamics in sterile-filtered samples of the conditioned growth medium can reveal both biologically meaningful changes in resource availability and temporally changing facilitative resource-mediated interactions between study species. This is the first study we are aware of where the filter-sterilization – growth assay method is applied to study the effect of long-term changes in the environment on species interactions.</p>