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Tree phylogenetic diversity promotes host-parasitoid interactions.

ABSTRACT: Evidence from grassland experiments suggests that a plant community's phylogenetic diversity (PD) is a strong predictor of ecosystem processes, even stronger than species richness per se This has, however, never been extended to species-rich forests and host-parasitoid interactions. We used cavity-nesting Hymenoptera and their parasitoids collected in a subtropical forest as a model system to test whether hosts, parasitoids, and their interactions are influenced by tree PD and a comprehensive set of environmental variables, including tree species richness. Parasitism rate and parasitoid abundance were positively correlated with tree PD. All variables describing parasitoids decreased with elevation, and were, except parasitism rate, dependent on host abundance. Quantitative descriptors of host-parasitoid networks were independent of the environment. Our study indicates that host-parasitoid interactions in species-rich forests are related to the PD of the tree community, which influences parasitism rates through parasitoid abundance. We show that effects of tree community PD are much stronger than effects of tree species richness, can cascade to high trophic levels, and promote trophic interactions. As during habitat modification phylogenetic information is usually lost non-randomly, even species-rich habitats may not be able to continuously provide the ecosystem process parasitism if the evolutionarily most distinct plant lineages vanish.

SUBMITTER: Staab M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4947881 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Tree phylogenetic diversity promotes host-parasitoid interactions.

Staab Michael M Bruelheide Helge H Durka Walter W Michalski Stefan S Purschke Oliver O Zhu Chao-Dong CD Klein Alexandra-Maria AM

Proceedings. Biological sciences 20160701 1834

Evidence from grassland experiments suggests that a plant community's phylogenetic diversity (PD) is a strong predictor of ecosystem processes, even stronger than species richness per se This has, however, never been extended to species-rich forests and host-parasitoid interactions. We used cavity-nesting Hymenoptera and their parasitoids collected in a subtropical forest as a model system to test whether hosts, parasitoids, and their interactions are influenced by tree PD and a comprehensive se ...[more]

PMID: 27383815

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Project description:Parasitoids are hyperdiverse and can contain morphologically and functionally cryptic species, making them challenging to study. Parasitoid speciation can arise from specialisation on niches or diverging hosts. However, which process dominates is unclear because cospeciation across multiple parasitoid and host species has rarely been tested. Host specificity and trophic interactions of the parasitoids of psyllids (Hemiptera) remain mostly unknown, but these factors are fundamentally important for understanding of species diversity, and have important applied implications for biological control.We sampled diverse parasitoid communities from eight Eucalyptus-feeding psyllid species in the genera Cardiaspina and Spondyliaspis, and characterised their phylogenetic and trophic relationships using a novel approach that forensically linked emerging parasitoids with the presence of their DNA in post-emergence insect mummies. We also tested whether parasitoids have cospeciated with their psyllid hosts. The parasitoid communities included three Psyllaephagus morphospecies (two primary and, unexpectedly, one heteronomous hyperparasitoid that uses different host species for male and female development), and the hyperparasitoid, Coccidoctonus psyllae. However, the number of genetically delimited Psyllaephagus species was three times higher than the number of recognisable morphospecies, while the hyperparasitoid formed a single generalist species. In spite of this, cophylogenetic analysis revealed unprecedented codivergence of this hyperparasitoid with its primary parasitoid host, suggesting that this single hyperparasitoid species is possibly diverging into host-specific species. Overall, parasitoid and hyperparasitoid diversification was characterised by functional conservation of morphospecies, high host specificity and some host switching between sympatric psyllid hosts.We conclude that host specialisation, host codivergence and host switching are important factors driving the species diversity of endoparasitoid communities of specialist host herbivores. Specialisation in parasitoids can also result in heteronomous life histories that may be more common than appreciated. A host generalist strategy may be rare in endoparasitoids of specialist herbivores despite the high conservation of morphology and trophic roles, and endoparasitoid species richness is likely to be much higher than previously estimated. This also implies that the success of biological control requires detailed investigation to enable accurate identification of parasitoid-host interactions before candidate parasitoid species are selected as biological control agents for target pests.

Project description:BackgroundHost population structure is a key determinant of pathogen and infectious disease transmission patterns. Pathogen phylogenetic trees are useful tools to reveal the population structure underlying an epidemic. Determining whether a population is structured or not is useful in informing the type of phylogenetic methods to be used in a given study. We employ tree statistics derived from phylogenetic trees and machine learning classification techniques to reveal an underlying population structure.ResultsIn this paper, we simulate phylogenetic trees from both structured and non-structured host populations. We compute eight statistics for the simulated trees, which are: the number of cherries; Sackin, Colless and total cophenetic indices; ladder length; maximum depth; maximum width, and width-to-depth ratio. Based on the estimated tree statistics, we classify the simulated trees as from either a non-structured or a structured population using the decision tree (DT), K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and support vector machine (SVM). We incorporate the basic reproductive number ([Formula: see text]) in our tree simulation procedure. Sensitivity analysis is done to investigate whether the classifiers are robust to different choice of model parameters and to size of trees. Cross-validated results for area under the curve (AUC) for receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves yield mean values of over 0.9 for most of the classification models.ConclusionsOur classification procedure distinguishes well between trees from structured and non-structured populations using the classifiers, the two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Cucconi and Podgor-Gastwirth tests and the box plots. SVM models were more robust to changes in model parameters and tree size compared to KNN and DT classifiers. Our classification procedure was applied to real -world data and the structured population was revealed with high accuracy of [Formula: see text] using SVM-polynomial classifier.

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Tree phylogenetic diversity promotes host-parasitoid interactions.

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Tree phylogenetic diversity promotes host-parasitoid interactions.

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