Dispersal, environmental forcing, and parasites combine to affect metapopulation synchrony and stability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dispersal can have positive and negative effects on metapopulation stability and persistence. One prediction is that high levels of dispersal synchronize density fluctuations between subpopulations. However, little is still known about how biotic and abiotic factors combine to modify the effects of dispersal rate on synchrony and metapopulation dynamics. In a fully factorial experimental design, we investigated the combined effects of (1) dispersal, (2) parasite infection, and (3) synchrony in temperature fluctuations on subpopulation synchrony, metapopulation instability, and minimum population size, in laboratory metapopulations of the ciliate Paramecium caudatum. Metapopulations, comprising two subpopulations linked by high or low levels of dispersal, were exposed to daily fluctuations in temperature between permissive (23 degrees C) and restrictive (5 degrees C) conditions. Infected metapopulations started the experiment with one subpopulation uninfected, while the other was infected at a prevalence of 5% with the bacterial parasite Holospora undulata. The temperature synchrony treatment involved subpopulations within a metapopulation following the same (synchronous temperatures) or different (asynchronous temperatures) temporal sequences. Population size was tracked over the 56-day experiment. We found that subpopulation density fluctuations were synchronized by high dispersal in infected metapopulations, and by synchronous temperatures in all metapopulations. Subpopulation synchrony was positively correlated with metapopulation instability and minimum metapopulation size, highlighting the multiple consequences of our treatments for metapopulation dynamics. Our results illustrate how parasites can generate dispersal-driven synchrony in non-cycling, declining populations. This "biotic forcing" via a natural enemy added to the temperature-dependent environmental forcing. We therefore conclude that predictions of metapopulation persistence in natural populations require simultaneous investigation of multiple ecological and epidemiological factors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".