Shifting systems: prerequisites for the application of quantitative fatty acid signature analysis in soil food webs.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Kuhn J
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7333970 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Quantitative fatty acid signature analysis (QFASA) as a biochemical tool to study the diet composition of predators is frequently used in marine ecology to infer trophic links in vertebrate consumers. However, the potential and challenges of this method in other ecosystems have only recently been studied. The application in soil ecosystems leads to hurdles not encountered in the marine, such as the low similarity of fatty acid signatures between resource and consumer. So far, diet estimation attempts have been semisuccessful, necessitating to adapt QFASA for use in soil food webs. Dietary fat content may play an important role, as it influences consumer metabolism, and thus calibration coefficients for fatty acid trophic transfer. A series of feeding trials with baker's yeast spiked with five different pure fatty acids at various concentrations was conducted with Collembola, and the changes in calibration coefficients were observed. From there, equations were gained through regression analysis and new sets of calibration coefficients were calculated. QFASA was applied on a range of basal resources and the results compared with previously defined calibration coefficients. Calibration coefficients changed with the proportion of fatty acids in the diet and differed between the three Collembolan species. The re-estimation of diets showed an improvement of model performance by the new calibration coefficients and indicated several modes of fatty acid assimilation. These greatly influence the outcome of diet estimation, for example, algal and bacterial diets are likely underestimated due to high metabolic turnover rates. The application of QFASA in soil ecosystems remains challenging. The variation in calibration coefficients and the resulting decrease in estimation deviation indicate the merit of calculating calibration coefficients from consumer signatures through linear or exponential equations. Ideally, the method should, when extended to the entire fatty acid signature, allow correct determination of consumer diets in soil food webs.
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Project description:Fatty acids are essential to macroinvertebrate growth and reproduction and can indicate food web structure and nutritional quality of basal resources. However, broad-scale examinations of how catchment land cover and associated stressors affect the proportions of fatty acids (FAs) in stream food webs are few.Here, we: (1) examine relationships among proportions of FAs among benthic periphyton and macroinvertebrate collector/gatherers, shredders, and predators; and (2) test if relationships between periphytic and macroinvertebrate FAs were altered due to the intensity of urban development in catchments.Proportions of the ?20-C eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA 20:5?3), arachidonic acid (ARA 20:4?6), and docosahexaenoic acid (22:6?3) indicated collector/gatherers had a diet richer in periphyton than in shredders, which had significantly lower proportions of these FAs. Collector/gatherers were in turn likely to be high-quality sources of ?3 and ? 20-C FAs for predators, which also had significantly greater EPA and ARA proportions than those in shredders. Linoleic (18:2?6) and ?-linolenic acid (18:3?3) comprised the greatest proportions of FAs in shredders, which suggested a diet dominated by leaf litter and associated hyphomycetes.As catchment urbanisation increased, proportions of total ?3 FAs and EPA in periphyton were significantly greater. This pattern also was seen through macroinvertebrate consumers and predators, given that proportions of these FAs in macroinvertebrates also were significantly correlated with factors associated with catchment urbanisation. The significant increase in total ?3 FAs and EPA proportions within shredders indicated that periphyton growth, and their FAs, increased on leaf litter, probably due to greater nutrient concentrations associated with catchment urbanisation. Proportions of total ?6 FAs in biota were not significantly correlated with factors associated with urban development, which could indicate that they were of sufficient abundance for consumers regardless of urban intensity or possible changes in their sources.Our study provides an informative first step that identified notable differences in proportions of FAs among macroinvertebrates in urban streams and an increase in proportions of total ?3 FAs and EPA in periphyton, consumers, and predators as catchment urbanisation increases. Identifying how FA relationships within food webs change in response to catchment alterations and stressors could inform land use and management decisions by linking environmental changes to measures important to ecosystem outcomes.
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Project description:The increasing severity and frequency of natural disturbances requires a better understanding of their effects on all compartments of biodiversity. In Northern Fennoscandia, recent large-scale moth outbreaks have led to an abrupt change in plant communities from birch forests dominated by dwarf shrubs to grass-dominated systems. However, the indirect effects on the belowground compartment remained unclear. Here, we combined eDNA surveys of multiple trophic groups with network analyses to demonstrate that moth defoliation has far-reaching consequences on soil food webs. Following this disturbance, diversity and relative abundance of certain trophic groups declined (e.g., ectomycorrhizal fungi), while many others expanded (e.g., bacterivores and omnivores) making soil food webs more diverse and structurally different. Overall, the direct and indirect consequences of moth outbreaks increased belowground diversity at different trophic levels. Our results highlight that a holistic view of ecosystems improves our understanding of cascading effects of major disturbances on soil food webs.
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Project description:The factors regulating the structure of food webs are a central focus of community and ecosystem ecology, as trophic interactions among species have important impacts on nutrient storage and cycling in many ecosystems. For soil invertebrates in grassland ecosystems in the Netherlands, the site-specific slopes of the faunal biomass to organism body mass relationships reflected basic biochemical and biogeochemical processes associated with soil acidity and soil C : N : P stoichiometry. That is, the higher the phosphorus availability in the soil, the higher, on average, the slope of the faunal biomass size spectrum (i.e., the higher the biomass of large-bodied invertebrates relative to the biomass of small invertebrates). While other factors may also be involved, these results are consistent with the growth rate hypothesis from biological stoichiometry that relates phosphorus demands to ribosomal RNA and protein production. Thus our data represent the first time that ecosystem phosphorus availability has been associated with allometry in soil food webs (supporting information available online). Our results have broad implications, as soil invertebrates of different size have different effects on soil processes.
| S-EPMC3597259 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The large range of body-mass values of soil organisms provides a tool to assess the ecological organization of soil communities. The goal of this paper is to identify graphical and quantitative indicators of soil community composition and ecosystem functioning, and to illustrate their application to real soil food webs. The relationships between log-transformed mass and abundance of soil organisms in 20 Dutch meadows and heathlands were investigated. Using principles of allometry, maximal use can be made of ecological theory to build and explain food webs. The aggregate contribution of small invertebrates such as nematodes to the entire community is high under low soil phosphorus content and causes shifts in the mass-abundance relationships and in the trophic structures. We show for the first time that the average of the trophic link lengths is a reliable predictor for assessing soil fertility responses. Ordered trophic link pairs suggest a self-organizing structure of food webs according to resource availability and can predict environmental shifts in ecologically meaningful ways.
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Project description:Mesofauna taxa fill key trophic positions in soil food webs, even in terrestrial-marine boundary habitats characterized by frequent natural disturbances. Salt marshes represent such boundary habitats, characterized by frequent inundations increasing from the terrestrial upper to the marine pioneer zone. Despite the high abundance of soil mesofauna in salt marshes and their important function by facilitating energy and carbon flows, the structure, trophic ecology and habitat-related diet shifts of mesofauna species in natural salt marsh habitats is virtually unknown. Therefore, we investigated the effects of natural disturbance (inundation frequency) on community structure, food web complexity and resource use of soil mesofauna using stable isotope analysis (15N, 13C) in three salt marsh zones. In this intertidal habitat, the pioneer zone is exposed to inundations twice a day, but lower and upper salt marshes are less frequently inundated based on shore height. The mesofauna comprised 86 species / taxa dominated by Collembola, Oribatida and Mesostigmata. Shifts in environmental disturbances influenced the structure of food webs, diversity and density declined strongly from the land to the sea pointing to the importance of increasing levels of inundation frequency. Accordingly, the reduced diversity and density was associated by a simplification of the food web in the pioneer zone as compared to the less inundated lower and upper salt marsh with a higher number of trophic levels. Strong variations in ?15N signatures demonstrated that mesofauna species are feeding at multiple trophic levels. Primary decomposers were low and most mesofauna species functioned as secondary decomposers or predators including second order predators or scavengers. The results document that major decomposer taxa, such as Collembola and Oribatida, are more diverse than previously assumed and predominantly dwell on autochthonous resources of the respective salt marsh zone. The results further suggest that Mesostigmata mostly adopt an intraguild predation lifestyle. The high trophic position of a large number of predators suggests that intraguild predation is of significant importance in salt marsh food webs. Presumably, intraguild predation contributes to stabilizing the salt marsh food web against disturbances.
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Project description:Climate warming is predicted to alter the structure, stability, and functioning of food webs1-5. Yet, despite the importance of soil food webs for energy and nutrient turnover in terrestrial ecosystems, warming effects on these food webs-particularly in combination with other global change drivers-are largely unknown. Here, we present results from two complementary field experiments testing the interactive effects of warming with forest canopy disturbance and drought on energy fluxes in boreal-temperate ecotonal forest soil food webs. The first experiment applied a simultaneous above- and belowground warming treatment (ambient, +1.7°C, +3.4°C) to closed canopy and recently clear-cut forest, simulating common forest disturbance6. The second experiment crossed warming with a summer drought treatment (-40% rainfall) in the clear-cut habitats. We show that warming reduces energy fluxes to microbes, while forest canopy disturbance and drought facilitates warming-induced increases in energy flux to higher trophic levels and exacerbates reductions in energy flux to microbes, respectively. Contrary to expectations, we find no change in whole-network resilience to perturbations, but significant losses of ecosystem functioning. Warming thus interacts with forest disturbance and drought, shaping the energetic structure of soil food webs and threatening the provisioning of multiple ecosystem functions in boreal-temperate ecotonal forests.
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Project description:Ecologists have long debated the properties that confer stability to complex, species-rich ecological networks. Species-level soil food webs are large and structured networks of central importance to ecosystem functioning. Here, we conducted an analysis of the stability properties of an up-to-date set of theoretical soil food web models that account both for realistic levels of species richness and the most recent views on the topological structure (who is connected to whom) of these food webs. The stability of the network was best explained by two factors: strong correlations between interaction strengths and the blocked, nonrandom trophic structure of the web. These two factors could stabilize our model food webs even at the high levels of species richness that are typically found in soil, and that would make random systems very unstable. Also, the stability of our soil food webs is well-approximated by the cascade model. This result suggests that stability could emerge from the hierarchical structure of the functional organization of the web. Our study shows that under the assumption of equilibrium and small perturbations, theoretical soil food webs possess a topological structure that allows them to be complex yet more locally stable than their random counterpart. In particular, results strongly support the general hypothesis that the stability of rich and complex soil food webs is mostly driven by correlations in interaction strength and the organization of the soil food web into functional groups. The implication is that in real-world food web, any force disrupting the functional structure and distribution pattern of interaction strengths (i.e., energy fluxes) of the soil food webs will destabilize the dynamics of the system, leading to species extinction and major changes in the relative abundances of species.
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Project description:Compound-specific isotope analyses (CSIA) of fatty acids (FA) constitute a promising tool for tracing energy flows in food-webs. However, past applications of FA-specific carbon isotope analyses have been restricted to a relatively coarse food-source separation and mainly quantified dietary contributions from different habitats. Our aim was to evaluate the potential of FA-CSIA to provide high-resolution data on within-system energy flows using algae and zooplankton as model organisms. First, we investigated the power of FA-CSIA to distinguish among four different algae groups, namely cyanobacteria, chlorophytes, haptophytes and diatoms. We found substantial within-group variation but also demonstrated that δ13C of several FA (e.g. 18:3ω3 or 18:4ω3) differed among taxa, resulting in group-specific isotopic fingerprints. Second, we assessed changes in FA isotope ratios with trophic transfer. Isotope fractionation was highly variable in daphnids and rotifers exposed to different food sources. Only δ13C of nutritionally valuable poly-unsaturated FA remained relatively constant, highlighting their potential as dietary tracers. The variability in fractionation was partly driven by the identity of food sources. Such systematic effects likely reflect the impact of dietary quality on consumers' metabolism and suggest that FA isotopes could be useful nutritional indicators in the field. Overall, our results reveal that the variability of FA isotope ratios provides a substantial challenge, but that FA-CSIA nevertheless have several promising applications in food-web ecology. This article is part of the theme issue 'The next horizons for lipids as 'trophic biomarkers': evidence and significance of consumer modification of dietary fatty acids'.
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Project description:By defecating grasses into aquatic systems at massive scales and intensities, hippos can initiate complex changes to aquatic ecosystems. However, consequent effects on food webs are not well understood, particularly regarding shifts in basal resource contributions to consumer diets and their physiological condition. Here, we use fatty acid analysis to show that dense hippo aggregations and high dung loading are associated with (1) alterations to basal resource pools, (2) reduced quality of sediment organic matter and (3) increases in terrestrial and bacterial biomarker levels, but declines in those of diatoms in estuarine secondary consumers. While hippo defecation can increase boundary permeability between terrestrial and aquatic systems, our findings indicate that this may lead to a shift from a microphytobenthic food web base to one with increasing bacterial contributions to higher consumers. Our findings expand understanding of the mechanisms by which an iconic African megaherbivore indirectly structures aquatic ecosystems.
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