Mechanisms of fungal community assembly in wild stoneflies moderated by host characteristics and local environment

Abstract

Deterministic and stochastic forces both drive microbiota assembly in animals, yet their relative contribution remains elusive, especially in wild aquatic-insect-associated fungal communities. Here, we applied amplicon sequencing to survey the assembly mechanisms of the fungal community in 155 wild stonefly individuals involving 44 species of 20 genera within eight families collected from multiple locations in China. Analysis showed that fungal diversity and network complexity differed significantly among the eight stonefly families, and that the fungal communities in stoneflies exhibited a significant distance-decay pattern across large spatial scales. Both a structural equation model and variance partitioning analysis revealed that environmental factors (e.g., geographical, climatic) outweigh host attributes in shaping the fungal community of stoneflies. Using neutral and null model analyses, we also find that deterministic processes play a larger role than stochasticity in driving the fungal community assembly. However, the relative contribution of ecological processes including dispersal, drift, and selection, varied strongly with host taxonomy. Furthermore, environmental conditions also significantly affect the strength of these ecological processes. Overall, our findings illustrate that variations in host attributes and environment factors may moderate the relative influence of deterministic and stochastic processes to fungal community composition in wild stoneflies, which provides new insights into mechanisms of microbial community assembly in aquatic arthropods.

Gut microbiota composition in the sympatric and diet‐sharing Drosophila simulans and Dicranocephalus wallichii bowringi shaped largely by community assembly processes rather than regional species pool

“…These contrasting observations indicate that the relative contribution of each ecological process varies strongly with host species. Recent studies also suggested that mechanisms of community assembly were related to other environmental factors such as geographic variables [ 28 , 31 ]. In our study, the magnitude of effects of drift and dispersal limitation differed across host taxa sharing the same environment.…”

“…Standardized and previously described protocols were then used to process the raw sequence data [ 30 , 31 ]. Briefly, in‐house Perl scripts were first used to demultiplex raw fastq files, and the following criteria were imposed to process barcode sequence information of each sample: (i) Reads (250 bp) were truncated at sites with an average quality score <20, determined over a 10 bp sliding window, and any segments <50 bp were discarded.…”

“…In contrast, other studies point to a more substantial effect of deterministic processes like selection [ 29 ]. Furthermore, the magnitude of these ecological processes is also closely related to the host species, diet, or environment [ 26 , 27 , 30 , 31 ].…”

Both symbionts and environmental factors contribute to shape the microbiota in a pest insect, Sogatella furcifera

“…For example, in the spider mite Tetranychus truncatus, Wolbachia infection was significantly influenced by annual mean temperatures, whereas the rates of Cardinium and Spiroplasma infections were correlated with altitude (Zhu et al, 2018). Additionally, Frontiers in Microbiology bacterial communities were significantly affected by geographical distances in stoneflies (Zhu et al, 2022). Herein, the abundance of numerous bacteria in S. furcifera were affected by environmental factors, with Wolbachia abundance significantly influenced by precipitation and longitude and Cardinium abundance not significantly affected by the environment (Figure 6 and Supplementary Figure S3).…”

Illuminating the Characteristics and Assembly of Prokaryotic Communities across a pH Gradient in Pit Muds for the Production of Chinese Strong-Flavor Baijiu

“…It is widely accepted that both deterministic and stochastic processes operate simultaneously during community assembly. For instance, the fungal community assembly in wild stoneflies is driven by both deterministic and stochastic forces, and deterministic processes play a larger role than stochasticity [25]. The stochastic and deterministic processes together shape microbial community assemblies in FGs, and their contribution changes with the CSFB fermentation [26].…”