A Metacommunity Model of Interacting Hosts with Microbe Exchange

Microbiomes, which are collections of interacting microbes in a specific environment, often substantially impact the environmental patches or living hosts that they occupy. To model the interactions between microbes across multiple scales, which include their local dynamics within
an environment and the exchange of microbes between environments, using metacommunity theory. Metacommunity models commonly assume continuous microbe dispersion between environments. Such a framework is well-suited to abiotic environmental patches, but it fails to capture the fact that living hosts interact with each other during discrete time intervals. In this talk, I present a modeling framework that successfully encodes such discrete interactions and uses two parameters to separately control the interaction frequencies between hosts and the amount of microbe exchange during each interaction. I illustrate the behavior of this model with both analytical approximations and numerical experiments.