1. Mixotrophic organisms can derive nutrition from both auto-and heterotrophy, which allows them to use a variety of trophic pathways to sustain their metabolic demands under variable conditions. Therefore, when facing environmental change, these organisms are expected to demonstrate an intrinsic ability to acclimatize through trophic plasticity.2. Scleractinian corals are ecologically important mixotrophs, but understanding their trophic plasticity has been impaired by an oversimplification towards inconsistent proxies of coral diet and overlooking intraspecific variability.3. Here, we applied a Bayesian analysis of carbon and nitrogen stable isotope data to determine the trophic niches of six common species of scleractinian corals and their associated endosymbionts, and combined it with an unsupervised machine learning algorithm to identify trophic behaviours and strategies.4. We found a variable amount of nutritional plasticity identified by different trophic behaviours within and between mixotrophic corals living under the same environmental conditions. Furthermore, we observed changes in trophic plasticity across environmental conditions. Corals from variable environments had larger host and endosymbiont niches than corals from stable environments. In addition, deeper corals had niches indicating a greater degree of heterotrophy than shallow corals. Collectively, corals exhibited distinct trophic strategies by promoting trophic niche differentiation along the mixotrophic continuum and conspecific individual colonies displayed high trophic variation. 5. Our results provide a foundation to understand how mixotrophic organisms may adjust their nutrition in response to ongoing global environmental change and the consequential modification of benthic assemblages.

The richness of Taiwanese reef fish species is inversely correlated to latitude as a direct consequence of the abiotic environment and its effects on benthic habitats. However, to date, no studies have investigated the variations in the diversity of traits (FD) linked with the role of these fishes in the ecosystem. FD is usually considered more sensitive than species richness in detecting early changes in response to disturbances, and therefore could serve as an indicator of ecological resilience to environmental changes. Here, we aim to characterize FD in the Taiwanese reef fish fauna and to document its regional variations. Six traits were used to categorize the 1,484 reef fish species occurring in four environmentally contrasted regions around Taiwan. The number of unique trait combinations (FEs), their richness (FRic), their redundancy (FR), their over‐redundancy (FOR), and their vulnerability (FV) were compared among these regions. Overall, 416 FEs were identified. Their number decreased from south to north in step with regional species richness but FRic remained similar among regions. FR and FOR were higher to the south. At the local scale, variations in FEs and FRic are in concordance with the worldwide pattern of FD. High‐latitude, impoverished fish assemblages, offer a range of trait combinations similar to diversified tropical assemblages. Increasing diversity in the latter mainly contributes to raising FR and supports already over‐redundant entities. High vulnerability makes many combinations highly sensitive to species loss, and was higher at intermediate latitudes when using a fine resolution in trait categories. It suggests that the loss of FEs may first be characterized by an increase in their vulnerability, a pattern that could have been overlooked in previous global scale analyses. Overall, this study provides new insights into reef fish trait biogeography with potential ramifications for ecosystem functioning.

Pythium myriotylum and Ralstonia solanacearum cause soft rot disease and bacterial wilt, respectively. In this study, we used the bacterial 16S V3–V4 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA region to investigate microbe compositions in healthy and diseased ginger soil and find out the influence of the well-known biocontrol agent B. velezensis and the fungicide Etridiazole on soil microbes and ginger productivity.