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

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 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 highlight bacterial hosts as active builders of ecological dynamics and environmental variation as a potential stabilizing force. Our findings thus bridge a theory-experiment gap and provide a framework for predicting microbial responses to environmental stress, which might have potential implications for phage therapy, microbiome management, and climate-impacted community resilience as well.