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Emergence of Ecological Structure and Species Rarity from Fluctuating Metabolic Strategies

Davide Zanchetta1,*, Deepak Gupta2,†, Sofia Moschin1, Samir Suweis1,3,4, Amos Maritan1,3,5, and Sandro Azaele1,3,5,‡

  • *Contact author: davide.zanchetta@phd.unipd.it
  • †Contact author: phydeepak.gupta@gmail.com
  • ‡Contact author: sandro.azaele@unipd.it
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PRX Life 3, 033016 – Published 28 August, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/5h2c-thdw

Abstract

Ecosystems frequently display the coexistence of diverse species under resource competition, typically resulting in skewed distributions of rarity and abundance. A potential driver of such coexistence is environmental fluctuations that favor different species over time. How to include and treat such temporal variability in existing consumer-resource models is still an open problem. In this work, we study correlated temporal fluctuations in species' resource uptake rates—i.e., metabolic strategies—within a stochastic consumer-resource framework. In a biologically relevant regime, we are able to find analytically the species abundance distributions through the path integral formalism. Our results reveal that stochastic dynamic metabolic strategies induce community structures that align more closely with empirical ecological observations. Within this framework, ecological communities show a higher diversity than expected under static competitive scenarios. We find that all species become extinct when the ratio of the number of species to the number of resources exceeds a critical threshold. Conversely, diversity peaks at intermediate values of the same ratio. Furthermore, when metabolic strategies of different species are different on average, maximal biodiversity is achieved for intermediate values of the amplitude of fluctuations. This work establishes a robust theoretical framework for exploring how temporal dynamics and stochasticity drive biodiversity and community structure.

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PRX Life 3, 033016– Published 28 August, 2025
  • Received 20 February 2025
  • Accepted 4 August 2025
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