Disturbances and non-living resource flows
Spatial flows were associated with disturbances, during which living biomass was turned into detritus and used for the resource flows. More specifically, every seven days (starting on day seven), we heated a fixed volume of the community of each patch to 100 °C in a laboratory oven to kill all organisms, thereby turning them into non-living resources (i.e., local disturbance). Heating was done such that any loss of water through evaporation was minimised, and replenished, respectively. Resource flows were carried out at a fixed volume of 5.25 ml per patch (this represented 70 % of a small patch, 23.3 % of a medium patch, and 14 % of a large patch). After cooling down, this detritus part of patches that belonged to a connected meta-ecosystem was transferred between the connected patches, while in the unconnected controls the same volume was poured back to the patch where it originated to control for the perturbation/mortality associated with cross-ecosystem resource flows (‘resource retention’ in Fig. 1), yet without having an actual cross-ecosystem flow. The loss of water through evaporation was replenished to keep the volume of cultures consistent by adding 1 ml of sterile protist medium to each patch after the third disturbance event.