Frequency Locking to Environmental Forcing Suppresses Oscillatory Extinction in Phage-Bacteria Interactions

TL;DR

This study shows that environmental fluctuations can stabilize phage-bacteria systems by suppressing oscillations, with bacterial growth rates and phage adsorption rates determining ecological outcomes, thus improving predictions of microbial persistence.

Contribution

It introduces a minimal ODE model revealing how environmental fluctuations and bacterial traits jointly influence microbial coexistence and oscillation suppression.

Findings

Environmental fluctuations suppress oscillations via resonance.

Lower bacterial growth rates enhance survival under high infection.

The model predicts coexistence, extinction, or oscillation outcomes based on parameters.

Abstract

Bacteriophage-bacteria interactions are central to microbial ecology, influencing evolution, biogeochemical cycles, and pathogen behavior. Most theoretical models assume static environments and passive bacterial hosts, neglecting the joint effects of bacterial traits and environmental fluctuations on coexistence dynamics. This limitation hinders the prediction of microbial persistence in dynamic ecosystems such as soils and oceans.Using a minimal ordinary differential equation framework, we show that the bacterial growth rate and the phage adsorption rate collectively determine three possible ecological outcomes: phage extinction, stable coexistence, or oscillation-induced extinction. Specifically, we demonstrate that environmental fluctuations can suppress destructive oscillations through resonance, promoting coexistence where static models otherwise predict collapse. Counterintuitively, we find that lower bacterial growth rates are helpful in enhancing survival under high infection pressure, elucidating the observed post-infection growth reduction.Our studies reframe bacterial hosts as active builders of ecological dynamics and environmental variation as a potential stabilizing force. Our findings thus bridge a key theory-experiment gap and provide a foundational framework for predicting microbial responses to environmental stress, which might have potential implications for phage therapy, microbiome management, and climate-impacted community resilience.