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Research article2017Peer reviewedOpen access

Parasites dominate hyperdiverse soil protist communities in Neotropical rainforests

Mahe, Frederic; de Vargas, Colomban; Bass, David; Czech, Lucas; Stamatakis, Alexandros; Lara, Enrique; Singer, David; Mayor, Jordan; Bunge, John; Sernaker, Sarah; Siemensmeyer, Tobias; Trautmann, Isabelle; Romac, Sarah; Berney, Cedric; Kozlov, Alexey; Mitchell, Edward A. D.; Seppey, Christophe V. W.; Egge, Elianne; Lentendu, Guillaume; Wirth, Rainer;
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Abstract

High animal and plant richness in tropical rainforest communities has long intrigued naturalists. It is unknown if similar hyper-diversity patterns are reflected at the microbial scale with unicellular eukaryotes (protists). Here we show, using enwironmental metabarcoding of soil samples and a phylogeny-aware cleaning step, that protist communities in Neotropical rainforests are hyperdiverse and dominated by the parasitic Apicomplexa, which infect arthropods and other animals. These host-specific parasites potentially contribute to the high animal diversity in the forests by reducing population growth in a density-dependent manner. By contrast, too few operational taxonomic units (OTUs) of Oomycota were found to broadly drive high tropical tree diversity in a host-specific manner under the Janzen-Connell model. Extremely high OTU diversity and high heterogeneity between samples within the same forests suggest that protists, not arthropods, are the most diverse eukaryotes in tropical rainforests. Our data show that protists play a large role in tropical terrestrial ecosystems long viewed as being dominated by macroorganisms.

Published in

Nature ecology & evolution
2017, Volume: 1, number: 4, article number: 0091Publisher: NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP

    UKÄ Subject classification

    Ecology
    Soil Science

    Publication identifier

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0091

    Permanent link to this page (URI)

    https://res.slu.se/id/publ/93371