What drives bacterial extinction? The role of bacteriophages

Mark M. Tanaka and Lindi M. Wahl

Theoretical Population Biology, 2026, vol. 167, issue C, 1-10

Abstract: Bacterial lineages are relatively short-lived on geological timescales, according to phylogenetic analyses, implying that bacterial extinction occurs at high rates. Since the vast majority of bacteria live in large populations in oceans and soils, many well-studied extinction mechanisms, such as demographic or environmental stochasticity, seem unlikely to drive this pattern. We outline mechanisms for the extinction of large bacterial populations, and discuss the emergence of a new virus as a possible cause of extinction. We use deterministic and stochastic models to characterise the persistence of a bacterial population, demonstrating that when resistance to a new virus does not emerge, large populations are more likely to go extinct than small populations, which contrasts with classically studied extinction mechanisms. When they go extinct, large populations also reach extinction more quickly. When phage-resistant bacteria appear, extinction is rare but its probability increases with population size in some parameter regimes. We also quantify bacterial extinction in spatially distinct subpopulations. We conclude that large bacterial populations are robust to many extinction mechanisms, and typically evolve resistance to new phages, as observed empirically. For bacterial lineages that have gone extinct, however, the failure to evolve resistance to a novel phage is a likely underlying mechanism.

Keywords: Bacterial evolution; Extinction; Predation; Bacteriophage; Evolutionary rescue; Mathematical model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:thpobi:v:167:y:2026:i:c:p:1-10

DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2025.12.001

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