  Marine viruses shape the structure of the microbial community. They are,
thus, a key determinant of the most important biogeochemical cycles in the
planet. Therefore, a correct description of the ecological and evolutionary
behavior of these viruses is essential to make reliable predictions about their
role in marine ecosystems. The infection cycle, for example, is indistinctly
modeled in two very different ways. In one representation, the process is
described including explicitly a fixed delay between infection and offspring
release. In the other, the offspring are released at exponentially distributed
times according to a fixed release rate. By considering obvious quantitative
differences pointed out in the past, the latter description is widely used as a
simplification of the former. However, it is still unclear how the dichotomy
"delay versus rate description" affects long-term predictions of host-virus
interaction models. Here, we study the ecological and evolutionary implications
of using one or the other approaches, applied to marine microbes. To this end,
we use mathematical and eco-evolutionary computational analysis. We show that
the rate model exhibits improved competitive abilities from both ecological and
evolutionary perspectives in steady environments. However, rate-based
descriptions can fail to describe properly long-term microbe-virus
interactions. Moreover, additional information about trade-offs between
life-history traits is needed in order to choose the most reliable
representation for oceanic bacteriophage dynamics. This result affects deeply
most of the marine ecosystem models that include viruses, especially when used
to answer evolutionary questions.
