Scale free density and correlations fluctuations in the dynamics of large microbial ecosystems

Abstract: Microorganisms self-organize in very large communities exhibiting complex fluctuations. Despite recent advances, still the mechanism by which these systems are able to exhibit large variability at the one hand and dynamical robustness on the other, is not fully explained. With that motivation, here we analyze three aspects of the dynamics of the microbiota and plankton: the density fluctuations, the correlation structure and the avalanching dynamics. In all communities under study we find that the results exhibits scale-free density fluctuations, anomalous variance' scaling, scale-free abundance correlations and stationary scale-free avalanching dynamics. These behaviors, typical in systems exhibiting critical dynamics, suggest criticality as a potential mechanism to explain both the robustness and (paradoxical) high irregularity of processes observed in very large microbial communities.