How can unsuccessful invaders drive long-term shifts in community state?

The stability of virtually all microbial communities is frequently challenged by the arrival of new individuals that could potentially invade the system. This urges for a deeper understanding of how invasions can interfere the dynamics of microbial communities. I will present a bistable model system to study the dynamics between alternative stable states in microbial ecosystems. By introducing additional species into the system, we observed induced transitions between stable states. Interestingly, in many cases the invading species did not survive in the final community state, making these species what we call a “transient invader.” This suggests that short-term invasions (such as infections) could be a common mechanism driving transitions between stable states in microbial communities.