Pack hunting by minute soil testate amoebae: nematode hell is a naturalist's paradise

Mitchell, Edward A. D.

doi:10.1111/1462-2920.13025

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…3). This pattern of dominating parasites contrasts with the prevailing view that soil protist communities are dominated by predators of bacteria 34 , although a considerable presence of protist predators of fungi and animals, as well as protist parasites, has been observed elsewhere [35][36][37][38][39][40][41] . These dominating protist parasites also potentially contribute to the high animal diversity in the rainforests by the same mechanisms that other parasites contribute to high tree diversity as hypothesized in the Janzen-Connell model 4,5 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

Parasites dominate hyperdiverse soil protist communities in Neotropical rainforests

et al. 2017

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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.S ince the works of early naturalists such as von Humboldt and Bonpland 1 , we have known that animal and plant communities in tropical rainforests are exceedingly species rich. For example, one hectare can contain more than 400 tree species 2 and one tree can harbour more than 40 ant species 3 . This hyperdiversity of trees has been partially explained by the Janzen-Connell model 4,5 , which hypothesizes that host-specific predators and parasites reduce plant population growth in a density-dependent manner 6,7 . Sampling up in the tree canopies and below on the ground has further led to the view that arthropods are the most diverse eukaryotes in tropical rainforests 8,9 .The focus on eukaryotic macroorganisms in these studies is primarily because they are familiar and readily observable to us. We do not know whether the less familiar and less readily observable protists-microbial eukaryotes that are not animals, plants or fungi 10 -inhabiting these same ecosystems exhibit similar diversity patterns. To evaluate if macroorganismic diversity patterns are reflected at the microbial scale with protists, we conducted an environmental DNA metabarcoding study by sampling soils in 279 locations in a variety of lowland Neotropical forest types in La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica, Barro Colorado Island, Panama and Tiputini Biodiversity Station, Ecuador. This metabarcoding approach has the power to uncover known and new taxa on a massive scale 11 . By amplifying DNA extracted from the soils with broadly targeted primers for the V4 region of 18S rRNA and sequencing it using the Illumina MiSeq platform, we were able to detect most eukaryotic lineages, and assess the diversity and relative dominance of free-living and parasitic lineages.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

Parasites dominate hyperdiverse soil protist communities in Neotropical rainforests

et al. 2017

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“…However, this does not mean that they do not potentially interact with each other. Several protists have been recorded as predators or parasites of metazoans (Adl and Gupta 2006;Jassey et al 2012;Geisen et al 2015b;Mitchell 2015), and these interactions might become more obvious when examining data on a more local scale or when looking at more specific groups. Alternatively, primer bias toward protists and fungi, which caused a relative low read number for metazoa, may explain the lack of correlation (see the Supporting Information).…”

Section: Bacteriamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, protists are by far the most diverse and (together with fungi) the most abundant soil eukaryotes (Ekelund and Rønn 1994;Foissner 1997;Finlay et al 2000). Different taxa of soil protists are known to function as consumers of bacteria, fungi and other protists (Clarholm 1981;de Ruiter, Neutel and Moore 1995;Geisen et al 2015b;Mitchell 2015), consume metazoans or act as parasites (Geisen et al 2015a(Geisen et al , 2016Mitchell 2015). Protists are therefore a crucial component of the soil microbial community, yet their response to environmental changes or community shifts of other microbial groups remains largely unknown (Geisen et al 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns of local, intercontinental and interseasonal variation of soil bacterial and eukaryotic microbial communities

Gruyter

Weedon

Bazot

et al. 2020

FEMS Microbiology Ecology

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Although ongoing research has revealed some of the main drivers behind global spatial patterns of microbial communities, spatio-temporal dynamics of these communities still remain largely unexplored. Here, we investigate spatio-temporal variability of both bacterial and eukaryotic soil microbial communities at local and intercontinental scales. We compare how temporal variation in community composition scales with spatial variation in community composition, and explore the extent to which bacteria, protists, fungi and metazoa have similar patterns of temporal community dynamics. All soil microbial groups displayed a strong correlation between spatial distance and community dissimilarity, which was related to the ratio of organism to sample size. Temporal changes were variable, ranging from equal to local between-sample variation, to as large as that between communities several thousand kilometers apart. Moreover, significant correlations were found between bacterial and protist communities, as well as between protist and fungal communities, indicating that these microbial groups change in tandem, potentially driven by interactions between them. We conclude that temporal variation can be considerable in soil microbial communities, and that future studies need to consider temporal variation in order to reliably capture all drivers of soil microbiome changes.

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“…2b). The volume of work on microbial bacteria and fungi far outweighs protist studies, possibly because of their direct role as primary decomposers, and they represent monophyletic groups that can more easily be studied with various targeted methodological approaches (Foissner, 1987;Mitchell, 2015). Even soil viruses have been subject to more studies than soil protists, despite being extremely challenging to study (Fierer et al, 2007) and their uncertain functional importance in soils.…”

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confidence: 99%

Soil protistology rebooted: 30 fundamental questions to start with

Geisen

Mitchell

Wilkinson

et al. 2017

Soil Biology and Biochemistry

147

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Protists are the most diverse eukaryotes. These microbes are keystone organisms of soil ecosystems and regulate essential processes of soil fertility such as nutrient cycling and plant growth. Despite this, protists have received little scientific attention, especially compared to bacteria, fungi and nematodes in soil studies. Recent methodological advances, particularly in molecular biology techniques, have made the study of soil protists more accessible, and have created a resurgence of interest in soil protistology. This ongoing revolution now enables comprehensive investigations of the structure and functioning of soil protist communities, paving the way to a new era in soil biology. Instead of providing an exhaustive review, we provide a synthesis of research gaps that should be prioritized in future studies of soil protistology to guide this rapidly developing research area. Based on a synthesis of expert opinion we propose 30 key questions covering a broad range of topics including evolution, phylogenetics, functional ecology, macroecology, paleoecology, and methodologies. These questions highlight a diversity of topics that will establish soil protistology as a hub discipline connecting different fundamental and applied fields such as ecology, biogeography, evolution, plant-microbe interactions, agronomy, and conservation biology. We are convinced that soil protistology has the potential to be one of the most exciting frontiers in biology

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Pack hunting by minute soil testate amoebae: nematode hell is a naturalist's paradise

Abstract: Tel. +41 (0)32 718 23 45; Fax +41 (0)32 718 30 01. Highlights on: Geisen et al. (2015) Pack hunting by a common soil amoeba on nematodes. Environmental Microbiology.bs_bs_banner

Cited by 9 publications

References 24 publications

Parasites dominate hyperdiverse soil protist communities in Neotropical rainforests

Parasites dominate hyperdiverse soil protist communities in Neotropical rainforests

Patterns of local, intercontinental and interseasonal variation of soil bacterial and eukaryotic microbial communities

Soil protistology rebooted: 30 fundamental questions to start with

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