Power law rank-abundance relationships in marine phage populations

Phage are the most abundant biological entities in the biosphere, with an estimated 10$^{31}$ particles on the planet. About 25{\%} of oceanic organic carbon is cycled through phage every day. Metagenomic analyses show that the rank-abundance curve for marine phage communities follows a power law distribution. This distribution is consistent with a proposed, modified version of Lotka-Volterra predator-prey dynamics, where blooms of a specific microbial species leads to blooms of their corresponding phage and a subsequent decrease in abundance. The model predicts that the majority of phage types in a population will be rare and it is unlikely that the most abundant phage will be the same at different time points. The model is based on spatial-temporal heterogeneity and a power law phage decay, which are both supported by empirical data.