Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities.

Permafrost thawing and the potential 'lab leak' of ancient microorganisms generate risks of biological invasions for today's ecological communities, including threats to human health via exposure to emergent pathogens. Whether and how such 'time-travelling' invaders could establish in modern communities is unclear, and existing data are too scarce to test hypotheses. To quantify the risks of time-travelling invasions, we isolated digital virus-like pathogens from the past records of coevolved artificial life communities and studied their simulated invasion into future states of the community. We then investigated how invasions affected diversity of the free-living bacteria-like organisms (i.e., hosts) in recipient communities compared to controls where no invasion occurred (and control invasions of contemporary pathogens). Invading pathogens could often survive and continue evolving, and in a few cases (3.1%) became exceptionally dominant in the invaded community. Even so, invaders often had negligible effects on the invaded community composition; however, in a few, highly unpredictable cases (1.1%), invaders precipitated either substantial losses (up to -32%) or gains (up to +12%) in the total richness of free-living species compared to controls. Given the sheer abundance of ancient microorganisms regularly released into modern communities, such a low probability of outbreak events still presents substantial risks. Our findings therefore suggest that unpredictable threats so far confined to science fiction and conjecture could in fact be powerful drivers of ecological change. Author summary: The idea that ancient pathogens trapped in ice or hidden in remote laboratory facilities could break free—usually with catastrophic consequences for human beings—has been a fruitful source of inspiration for generations of science fiction novelists and screenwriters. However, the unprecedented rates of melting of glaciers and permafrost are now giving many types of ice-dormant microorganisms concrete opportunities to re-emerge, bringing to the fore questions about their potential. Yet, the scientific debate on the topic has been dominated by speculation, due to the challenges in collecting appropriate data or designing experiments to elaborate and test hypotheses. For the first time, we provide an extensive exploration of the ecological risk posed to modern ecological communities by these 'time-travelling' pathogens by taking advantage of the flexibility and realism of in silico simulations. We found that invading pathogens could often survive, evolve and, in a few cases, become exceptionally persistent and dominant in the invaded community, causing either substantial losses or gains in the total richness of free-living species. Our findings therefore suggest that unpredictable threats so far confined to science fiction and conjecture could be powerful drivers of ecological change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]