How hydrodynamic turbulence combines with biological interactions in growing microbial communities

Determine how oceanic turbulent flows—including two-dimensional incompressible turbulence that generates patchy spatial patterns and hydrodynamical niches—interact with biological inter-strain interactions (such as antagonism and selective differences) in growing microbial populations to govern spatial organization and fixation outcomes from heterogeneous initial conditions.

Background

Marine microorganisms (e.g., phytoplankton) grow within complex, turbulent fluid environments that can create patchiness, transient niches, and influence coexistence across spatial and temporal scales. Prior work has characterized how turbulence affects passive scalars and some aspects of population dynamics, often emphasizing compressible effects at submesoscales.

However, many microbial communities exhibit nonreciprocal and antagonistic interactions that actively prevent mixing and induce nucleation dynamics, leading to fixation or extinction via interface-driven processes. The general mechanisms by which fluid turbulence and such biological interactions combine to shape spatial organization and competitive outcomes have not been fully resolved, motivating the investigation in this paper.

References

But how these hydrodynamic processes combine with biological interactions between growing communities of distinct microbial strains remains a challenging open question.

— Turbulent mixing controls fixation of growing antagonistic populations  (2408.16784 - Bauermann et al., 2024) in Main text, Introduction (opening paragraph)