You are what you eat: nutrient and water relations between mistletoes and hosts

Abstract

Mistletoes play important roles in biogeochemical cycles. Although many studies have compared nutrient concentrations between mistletoes and their hosts, no general patterns have been found and the nutrient uptake mechanisms in mistletoes have not been fully resolved.To address the water and nutrient relations in mistletoes compared with their hosts, we measured 11 nutrient elements, two isotope ratios and two leaf morphological traits for 11 mistletoe and 104 host species from four sites across a large environmental gradient in southwest China.Mistletoes had significantly higher phosphorus, potassium, and boron concentrations, nitrogen isotope ratio, and lower carbon isotope ratio (δ 13 C) indicative of lower water-use efficiency than hosts, but other elements were similar to those in hosts. Sites explained most of the variation in the multidimensional trait space. With increasing host nitrogen concentration, both mistletoe δ 13 C and the difference between mistletoe and host δ 13 C increased, providing evidence to support the 'nitrogen parasitism hypothesis'. Host nutrient concentrations were the best predictors for that of the mistletoe nutrient elements in most cases.Our results highlight the important roles of environmental conditions and host nutrient status in determining mistletoe nutrient pools, which together explain their trophic interactions with hosts in subtropical and tropical ecosystems.

Resource availability and parasitism intensity influence the response of soybean to the parasitic plant Cuscuta australis

“…With changes in resources availability, plants exhibit morphological, physiological, and biochemical changes, consequent changes in metabolites, enzymes, and behaviors, and ultimately adaptive changes in phenotype and genotype ( Vierling and Kimpel, 1992 ; Salazar-Mendoza et al., 2023 ). The physiological and biochemical changes in host plants can induce ecologically important responses of parasitic plants ( Evans and Borowicz, 2015 ; Zhang et al., 2023 ) and result in indirect effects of host plants on the growth of parasitic plants ( Zagorchev et al., 2021 ). For example, fertilization can boost the growth of parasitic plants and thus enhance the deleterious effects of parasitic plants on host plants ( Yang et al., 2015 ).…”