Distribution Patterns of Ciliate Diversity in the South China Sea

Abstract

Ciliates are abundant microplankton that are widely distributed in the ocean. In this paper, the distribution patterns of ciliate diversity in the South China Sea (SCS) were analyzed by compiling community data from previous publications. Based on morphological identification, a total of 592 ciliate species have been recorded in the SCS. The ciliate communities in intertidal, neritic and oceanic water areas were compared in terms of taxonomy, motility and feeding habit composition, respectively. Significant community variation was revealed among the three areas, but the difference between the intertidal area and the other two areas was more significant than that between neritic and oceanic areas. The distributions of ciliates within each of the three areas were also analyzed. In the intertidal water, the community was not significantly different among sites but did differ among habitat types. In neritic and oceanic areas, the spatial variation of communities among different sites was clearly observed. Comparison of communities by taxonomic and ecological traits (motility and feeding habit) indicated that these traits similarly revealed the geographical pattern of ciliates on a large scale in the SCS, but to distinguish the community variation on a local scale, taxonomic traits has higher resolution than ecological traits. In addition, we assessed the relative influences of environmental and spatial factors on assembly of ciliate communities in the SCS and found that environmental selection is the major process structuring the taxonomic composition in intertidal water, while spatial processes played significant roles in influencing the taxonomic composition in neritic and oceanic water. Among ecological traits, environmental selection had the most important impact on distributions.

Diversity Patterns of Protists Are Highly Affected by Methods Disentangling Biological Variants: A Case Study in Oligotrich (s.l.) Ciliates

“…ciliates. This was also revealed in various prokaryotic and eukaryotic microbial groups in estuaries (e.g., [ 34 , 52 , 63 ]).…”

“…OTUs/ASVs inferred by UCLUST–99 (248) is unreasonable ( Table 1 ), because only 288 morphological oligotrich (s.l.) ciliate species were reported in the South China Sea from 1991 to 2018 [ 52 ]. The numbers of oligotrich (s.l.)…”

Diversity Patterns of Protists are Highly Affected by Methods Disentangling Inter-specific Variants: A Case Study in Oligotrich (s.l.) Ciliates

“…ciliates. This is also revealed in various prokaryotic and eukaryotic microbial groups in estuaries (e.g., [44,54,56]).…”

“…2a, b and d). Secondly, both sampling areas ZH and SZ are located in nearshore of Pearl River Estuary, where environmental factors and community structures of ciliates are highly in uenced by human activities [44,51,52]. All these indicate that beta diversity patterns of DADA2-100E and UCLUST-99E are more reliable than those of UPARSE-97E and UCLUST-97E.…”

“…OTUs/ASVs inferred by UPARSE-97E (63) and DADA2-100E (103) are more reliable than those inferred by UCLUST-97E (521) and UCLUST-99E (2154) (Table 1). That is because only 592 morphological ciliate species were reported in South China Sea from 1991 to 2018 [44]. Surprisingly, the proportion of oligotrich (s.l.)…”