Interaction range of common goods shapes Black Queen dynamics beyond the cheater-cooperator narrative

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Microbes rarely survive alone. Like workers in an economy, they often specialize, with some individuals producing essential resources that others depend on. Using computer simulations, researchers from the University of Auckland and Utrecht University discovered that how many others these resources can benefit determines whether communities become highly specialized, divvying up the labour, or dominated by a single generalist "workhorse" exploited by freeloaders.

Surprisingly, communities can appear stable for hundreds of thousands of generations before suddenly reorganizing. These findings challenge simple "cheater versus cooperator" views of microbial life, with implications for understanding gut microbiomes, antibiotic resistance, and environmental ecosystems.