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Do bacterial populations go extinct? The role of viral predators.
Recent phylogenetic evidence suggests that historically, bacterial species have gone extinct at high rates. This poses a puzzle since many of the usual threats to survival – such as demographic stochasticity, inbreeding or environmental change – would often be mitigated by the very large population sizes maintained in microbial populations. Through a bifurcation analysis of an expanded host-parasite model, we demonstrate that bacterial populations may be driven to extinction, deterministically, when a viral predator of a competing bacterial species expands its host range. This suggests that viral predators of bacteria (bacteriophages), the most abundant organisms on earth, may be important drivers of bacterial extinctions.