  Statistical fluctuations in population sizes of microbes may be quite large
depending on the nature of their underlying stochastic dynamics. For example,
the variance of the population size of a microbe undergoing a pure birth
process with unlimited resources is proportional to the square of its mean. We
refer to such large fluctuations, with the variance growing as square of the
mean, as Giant Number Fluctuations (GNF). Luria and Delbruck showed that
spontaneous mutation processes in microbial populations exhibit GNF. We explore
whether GNF can arise in other microbial ecologies. We study certain simple
ecological models evolving via stochastic processes: (i) bi-directional
mutation, (ii) lysis-lysogeny of bacteria by bacteriophage, and (iii)
horizontal gene transfer (HGT). For the case of bi-directional mutation
process, we show analytically exactly that the GNF relationship holds at large
times. For the ecological model of bacteria undergoing lysis or lysogeny under
viral infection, we show that if the viral population can be experimentally
manipulated to stay quasi-stationary, the process of lysogeny maps essentially
to one-way mutation process and hence the GNF property of the lysogens follows.
Finally, we show that even the process of HGT may map to the mutation process
at large times, and thereby exhibits GNF.
