Fig. 2: Most communities change significantly during the hundreds of generations following ecological equilibrium.

A Trajectories of the community composition of all replicates of four randomly picked communities representing different levels of stability and repeatability. Colors denote the different species in the community, and different lines are different replicates. Two arrows on the upper-right panel denote the time when most replicates have likely reached an ecological equilibrium (black arrow), and when this equilibrium was disrupted in most replicates (gray arrow). Error bars represent the standard deviation of the posterior beta distribution of the fractions, based on colony counts in each replicate, Error bars were calculated as \(\sigma =\frac{\sqrt{p(1-p)}}{n+1}\), where p is the observed species fraction (colored dot) and n is the total number of colonies counted for a given replicate. For all cases n > 15. B Change in community composition across all communities quantified as the Euclidean distance between the composition of each replicate at two subsequent time points normalized to the maximal distance between two communities composed of n species (\(\sqrt{n}\)), denoted as \(\Delta (t,t-1)\). C Change in community composition at evolutionary timescales measured as the Euclidean distance between the composition of each replicate in each time point and its composition at generation ~70 (\(\Delta (g,{g}_{70})\)). Generation ~70 is used here as the starting point of the evolutionary timescale since changes in most communities are less rapid after these timescales. For both B and C, blue and orange lines denote the median and shaded areas denote the interquartile range across all pairs and trios, respectively. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.