Fig. 1. Microcosm communities approach distinct equilibria.

a Relative abundances of the top 20 Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASVs) across the ten microcosms during the course of the serial transfer experiment. ASVs are listed one time each on the bar plot, with taxonomic classification in the legend. The DNA concentrations for each timepoint are graphed above as points, with a Loess fit as a solid line. b Communities change quickly and then stabilize in the two-dimensional Non-metric Multidimensional Scaling (NMDS) plot of Bray–Curtis dissimilarities of the microcosm community compositions. The microcosm name is listed in black next to the Day 0 point for each microcosm, and the lines connect the timepoints. Colored numbers indicate the mean effective number of species for each community post Day 21. c The Bray–Curtis dissimilarity of ASV relative abundances between adjacent days decreases over the course of the experiment. The thick black line shows a Loess fit to all data points, and the thin line marks Day 21. d At the end of the experiment, most ASVs were present in only one microcosm (top), but ASVs present in more microcosms tended to have higher mean relative abundances (bottom), shown as black circles with ±1 standard deviation error bars.