Dataset Information

Physiology underlies the assembly of ecological communities.

ABSTRACT: Trait-based community ecology promises an understanding of the factors that determine species abundances and distributions across habitats. However, ecologists are often faced with large suites of potentially important traits, making generalizations across ecosystems and species difficult or even impossible. Here, we hypothesize that key traits structuring ecological communities may be causally dependent on common physiological mechanisms and that elucidating these mechanisms can help us understand the distributions of traits and species across habitats. We test this hypothesis by investigating putatively causal relationships between physiological and behavioral traits at the species and community levels in larvae of 17 species of dragonfly that co-occur at the landscape scale but segregate among lakes. We use tools borrowed from phenotypic selection analyses to show that physiological traits underlie activity rate, which has opposing effects on foraging and predator avoidance behaviors. The effect of activity on these behaviors ultimately shapes species distributions and community composition in habitats with either large-bodied fish or invertebrates as top predators. Remarkably, despite the inherent complexity of ecological communities, the expression of just two biomolecules accounts for a high proportion of the variation in behavioral traits and hence, dragonfly community composition between habitats. We suggest that causal relationships among traits can drive species distributions and community assembly.

SUBMITTER: Start D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6003365 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Physiology underlies the assembly of ecological communities.

Start Denon D McCauley Shannon S Gilbert Benjamin B

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20180521 23

Trait-based community ecology promises an understanding of the factors that determine species abundances and distributions across habitats. However, ecologists are often faced with large suites of potentially important traits, making generalizations across ecosystems and species difficult or even impossible. Here, we hypothesize that key traits structuring ecological communities may be causally dependent on common physiological mechanisms and that elucidating these mechanisms can help us underst ...[more]

PMID: 29784774

Similar Datasets

Project description:UnlabelledBacteria living on the aerial parts of plants (the phyllosphere) are globally abundant and ecologically significant communities and can have significant effects on their plant hosts. Despite their importance, little is known about the ecological processes that drive phyllosphere dynamics. Here, we describe the development of phyllosphere bacterial communities over time on the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana in a controlled greenhouse environment. We used a large number of replicate plants to identify repeatable dynamics in phyllosphere community assembly and reconstructed assembly history by measuring the composition of the airborne community immigrating to plant leaves. We used more than 260,000 sequences from the v5v6 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene to characterize bacterial community structure on 32 plant and 21 air samples over 73 days. We observed strong, reproducible successional dynamics: phyllosphere communities initially mirrored airborne communities and subsequently converged to a distinct community composition. While the presence or absence of particular taxa in the phyllosphere was conserved across replicates, suggesting strong selection for community composition, the relative abundance of these taxa was highly variable and related to the spatial association of individual plants. Our results suggest that stochastic events in early colonization, coupled with dispersal limitation, generated alternate trajectories of bacterial community assembly within the context of deterministic selection for community membership.ImportanceCommensal bacteria associated with plants help protect their hosts against infection and promote growth. Bacteria associated with plant leaves (the "phyllosphere") are highly abundant and diverse communities, but we have very limited information about their ecology. Here, we describe the formation of phyllosphere communities on the plant model organism Arabidopsis thaliana. We grew a large number of plants in a greenhouse and measured bacterial diversity in the phyllosphere throughout the Arabidopsis life cycle. We also measured the diversity of airborne microbes landing on leaves. Our findings show that plants develop distinctive phyllosphere bacterial communities drawn from low-abundance air populations, suggesting the plant environment is favorable for particular organisms and not others. However, we also found that the relative abundances of bacteria in the phyllosphere are determined primarily by the physical proximity of individual plants. This suggests that a mixture of selective and random forces shapes phyllosphere communities.

Project description:The ecological drivers that concurrently act upon both a virus and its host and that drive community assembly are poorly understood despite known interactions between viral populations and their microbial hosts. Hydraulically fractured shale environments provide access to a closed ecosystem in the deep subsurface where constrained microbial and viral community assembly processes can be examined. Here, we used metagenomic analyses of time-resolved-produced fluid samples from two wells in the Appalachian Basin to track viral and host dynamics and to investigate community assembly processes. Hypersaline conditions within these ecosystems should drive microbial community structure to a similar configuration through time in response to common osmotic stress. However, viral predation appears to counterbalance this potentially strong homogeneous selection and pushes the microbial community toward undominated assembly. In comparison, while the viral community was also influenced by substantial undominated processes, it assembled, in part, due to homogeneous selection. When the overall assembly processes acting upon both these communities were directly compared with each other, a significant relationship was revealed, suggesting an association between microbial and viral community development despite differing selective pressures. These results reveal a potentially important balance of ecological dynamics that must be in maintained within this deep subsurface ecosystem in order for the microbial community to persist over extended time periods. More broadly, this relationship begins to provide knowledge underlying metacommunity development across trophic levels.IMPORTANCE Interactions between viral communities and their microbial hosts have been the subject of many recent studies in a wide range of ecosystems. The degree of coordination between ecological assembly processes influencing viral and microbial communities, however, has been explored to a much lesser degree. By using a combined null modeling approach, this study investigated the ecological assembly processes influencing both viral and microbial community structure within hydraulically fractured shale environments. Among other results, significant relationships between the structuring processes affecting both the viral and microbial community were observed, indicating that ecological assembly might be coordinated between these communities despite differing selective pressures. Within this deep subsurface ecosystem, these results reveal a potentially important balance of ecological dynamics that must be maintained to enable long-term microbial community persistence. More broadly, this relationship begins to provide insight into the development of communities across trophic levels.

Project description:As the water source for the Middle Route Project of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project (MR-SNWD) of China, the Danjiangkou Reservoir (DJR) is in the process of ecosystem reassembly, but the composition, function, and assembly mechanisms of bacterioplankton communities are not yet clear. In this study, the composition, distribution characteristics and influencing factors of bacterioplankton communities were analyzed by high-throughput sequencing (HTS); PICRUSt2 was used to predict community function; a molecular ecological network was used to analyze bacterioplankton interactions; and the assembly process of bacterioplankton communities was estimated with a neutral model. The results indicated that the communities, function and interaction of bacterioplankton in the DJR had significant annual and seasonal variations and that the seasonal differences were greater than that the annual differences. Excessive nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) nutrients in the DJR are the most important factors affecting water quality in the reservoir, N and P nutrients are the main factors affecting bacterial communities. Season is the most important factor affecting bacterioplankton N and P cycle functions. Ecological network analysis indicated that the average clustering coefficient and average connectivity of the spring samples were lower than those of the autumn samples, while the number of modules for the spring samples was higher than that for the autumn samples. The neutral model explained 66.3%, 63.0%, 63.0%, and 70.9% of the bacterioplankton community variations in samples in the spring of 2018, the autumn of 2018, the spring of 2019, and the autumn of 2019, respectively. Stochastic processes dominate bacterioplankton community assembly in the DJR. This study revealed the composition, function, interaction, and assembly of bacterioplankton communities in the DJR, providing a reference for the protection of water quality and the ecological functions of DJR bacterioplankton.

Dataset Information

Physiology underlies the assembly of ecological communities.

Publications

Physiology underlies the assembly of ecological communities.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets