Fig. 4.

Species (A–L) interactions estimated from minimal communities ensuring biomass growth (details are provided in Materials and Methods, Data Analyses and Fig. 2) in environment 1 (A), environment 2 (B), and environment 3 (C). Benzoate degraders are marked with a small filled black circle. Filled gray circles indicate a species’ ability to grow under the given environmental conditions as a monoculture. Dashed circles indicate that a species never was the activator species. Otherwise, sizes of solid circles indicate how often a species was the activator species (relative number of all cases in the given environment). Arrows point from a potential partner species to an activator species if the respective partner species was present in either 100% (solid black arrows) or at least 80% (dashed gray arrows) of the corresponding minimal communities. This method reveals potential specific partners for species interactions, which differed strongly among the different environments.