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Parasites dominate hyperdiverse soil protist communities in Neotropical rainforests
Auteur(s)
Mahé, Frédéric
de Vargas, Colomban
Bass, David
Czech, Lucas
Stamatakis, Alexandros
Mayor, Jordan
Bunge, John
Sernaker, Sarah
Siemensmeyer, Tobias
Trautmann, Isabelle
Romac, Sarah
Berney, Cédric
Kozlov, Alexey
Seppey, Christophe V. W
Egge, Elianne
Wirth, Rainer
Trueba, Gabriel
Dunthorn, Micah
In
NATURE ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION, Springer Nature, 2017/1/art no 0091/1-8
Résumé
High animal and plant richness in tropical rainforest communities has long intrigued naturalists. It is unknown if similar hyperdiversity patterns are reflected at the microbial scale with unicellular eukaryotes (protists). Here we show, using environmental 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.
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Type de publication
journal article
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