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The Ecosystem Dynamics That Can Make or Break an Invasion
By speedrunning ecosystems with microbes, researchers revealed intrinsic properties that may make a community susceptible to invasion.
Plus, unlike with wild plants and animals, “nobody cares what you do to microbes,” noted William R. Shoemaker, a microbial ecologist at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, who is not involved in the research. In 2022, Gore and colleagues discovered that ecological communities undergo phase transitions — a core organizing principle in physics that describes, for example, water’s change from solid ice to liquid to gas. To explore this question, Jiliang Hu, then a graduate student in Gore’s lab, went outside and collected soil from a lawn on the MIT campus, as well as leaves from nearby trees and water from the Charles River.
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