A Snap-Shot of Domatial Mite Diversity of Coffea arabica in Comparison to the Adjacent Umtamvuna Forest in South Africa

Sivuyisiwe Situngu,Susanne Vetter,Nigel P Barker

doi:10.3390/d12020079

Sivuyisiwe Situngu, Susanne Vetter + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/d12020079

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Journal: Diversity	Publication Date: Feb 18, 2020
Citations: 2	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Rhodes University, University of Pretoria

Abstract

Some plant species possess structures known as leaf domatia, which house mites. The association between domatia-bearing plants and mites has been proposed to be mutualistic, and has been found to be important in species of economic value, such as grapes, cotton, avocado and coffee. This is because leaf domatia affect the distribution, diversity and abundance of predatory and mycophagous mites found on the leaf surface. As a result, plants are thought to benefit from increased defence against pathogens and small arthropod herbivores. This study assesses the relative diversity and composition of mites on an economically important plant host (Coffea aribica) in comparison to mites found in a neighbouring indigenous forest in South Africa. Our results showed that the coffee plantations were associated with only predatory mites, some of which are indigenous to South Africa. This indicates that coffee plantations are able to be successfully colonised by indigenous beneficial mites. We also found an “edge effect”, in that coffee trees at the edge of the plantation hosted fewer mite species. These results are a snap-shot from a single sampling period. Nonetheless, they highlight the potential importance of this mutualism in commercial crop species and the possible role of faunal exchanges between indigenous and exotic crop species. This study expands our understanding of the mite–plant mutualism in Southern Africa, a region where acarological studies are sparse.

Highlights

The commercial coffee plant, Coffea arabica L. (Rubiaceae), originates from Ethiopia and is cultivated worldwide in more than 50 countries [1,2]
Nine different species of mites were collected from leaves of coffee, and 20 mite species were found on the forest tree species
They indicate that, despite being adjacent to the indigenous forest, the coffee plantations at Beaver Creek were associated with a different suite of native species of predatory mites

Summary

Introduction

The commercial coffee plant, Coffea arabica L. (Rubiaceae), originates from Ethiopia and is cultivated worldwide in more than 50 countries [1,2]. (Rubiaceae), originates from Ethiopia and is cultivated worldwide in more than 50 countries [1,2]. Leaves of this species bear pit-type domatia, and coffee is one of many economically important species that have been shown to benefit from the association with mites [3,4,5,6,7,8]. Other economically important plants known to have an association with mites include grapes, avocado, sweet pepper plants and cassava [4,6,9,10,11]. Agrawal et al [4] showed that cotton plants with

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