Maternal Environment Effect of Warming and Eutrophication on the Emergence of Curled Pondweed, Potamogeton crispus L.

Abstract

Maternal effects may play an important role in life history and offspring performance of aquatic plants. Performance and response of maternal and offspring aquatic plants can affect population dynamics and community composition. Understanding maternal effect can help to fill a gap in the knowledge of aquatic plant life cycles, and provide important insights for species’ responses to climate change and eutrophication. This study showed that maternal warming and eutrophication significantly affected the early life stages of curled pondweed, Potamogeton crispus, a submerged macrophyte. Propagule in warmed condition had higher germination percentages and a shorter mean germination time than those under ambient conditions. However, propagule germination in phosphorus addition treatment was inhibited due to the negative effect of eutrophication, e.g., phytoplankton competition and deteriorated underwater light. Meanwhile, elevated temperature led to a decrease of total nitrogen concentrations and an increase of carbon: nitrogen ratios in plant tissues, which may suggest that P. crispus will allocate more nutrients to propagules in order to resist the adverse effects of high temperature. A subsequent germination experiment in the same ambient condition showed that maternal warming promoted seedling emergence in contrast to maternal phosphorus addition. Consequently, global warming could modify population growth via maternal environmental effects on early life histories, while increased anthropogenic nutrient inputs may result in a decreased submerged macrophyte. These maternal effects on offspring performance may change competition and the survival of early life-history stages under climate warming and eutrophication through changing the ecological stoichiometry of plant tissue.

Seed source regions drive fitness differences in invasive macrophytes

“…Indeed, the environmental conditions experienced by parents can be translated into phenotypic variation in offspring (Mousseau and Fox, 1998; Matesanz and Valladares, 2014). Thus, maternal effects, although too rarely studied and dissociated from other genotype × environment effects in plants, can influence the life history of offspring (Galloway, 2001, 2002; Li et al., 2018) and may have primed offspring responses to the common garden conditions for those propagules originating from mediterranean climates. Even though propagule size is heavily dependent on maternal investment and can influence propagule resources and performance (Mousseau and Fox, 1998; Larios and Venable, 2015, but see Lacey et al., 1997), the differences in average initial seed mass in our experiment (Appendix S2) did not correspond with other traits differences.…”

Spatially Structured Environmental Variation Plays a Prominent Role on the Biodiversity of Freshwater Macrophytes Across China

“…Our results also highlight the dominant role of climatic gradients in driving spatially structured patterns of all facets of diversity across watersheds. Climatic gradients at large spatial scales can influence biodiversity patterns through multiple mechanisms related to the physiology, energetic demand and dispersal limitations of species (Fu et al, 2018; Li et al, 2018; Zhang et al, 2019). Spatial structure in the diversity facets of TRic, FRic, FEve, and FDiv was significantly explained by broad-scale dbMEMs (Supplementary Figure S1).…”

Bacterial Metabolic Potential in Response to Climate Warming Alters the Decomposition Process of Aquatic Plant Litter—In Shallow Lake Mesocosms

“…Lake sediment was collected with a Peterson grab sampler from a pelagic area in Lake Liangzihu (30°11′3″ N, 114°37′59″ E) in late October 2018. Lake Liangzihu is a mesotrophic shallow lake in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River basin, with TN and TP concentrations in the water column of our sampling area of approximately 0.432 mg L −1 and 0.023 mg L −1 , respectively [ 6 , 32 ].…”