Abstract
We examined how plant sex affected the community structure of nectar-colonizing microbes. These microorganisms, including bacteria and fungi, were more abundant in male flowers than in female flowers, with the identity of the dominant microbial species also affected by flower sex. Our results suggested that this sexual difference arose because female and male flowers differed in how they responded to visits by nectar-feeding insects that bring microorganisms into nectar and how the history of the arrival of these microbes influenced the development of microbial communities in nectar. These photographs illustrate the article “Community-wide consequences of sexual dimorphism: evidence from nectar microbes in dioecious plants” by Kaoru Tsuji and Tadashi Fukami published in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.2494
Highlights
Over the past decade, there has been increasing recognition that intraspecific trait variation can have a major effect on how ecological communities develop, potentially rivaling the effect of interspecific trait variation (Bolnick et al 2011, Violle et al 2012, Lajoie and Vellend 2015)
To determine if the effect of flower sex was consistent across microbial species, we identified some of the microbial colonies
Bagging had no significant effect on bacterial frequency (Fig. 2b) and increased bacterial abundance (Fig. 2d), which was positively associated with the Brix value (Appendix S1: Table S8, Fig. S8d)
Summary
There has been increasing recognition that intraspecific trait variation can have a major effect on how ecological communities develop, potentially rivaling the effect of interspecific trait variation (Bolnick et al 2011, Violle et al 2012, Lajoie and Vellend 2015). One pervasive and often dramatic form of intraspecific variation is sexual dimorphism in animals and plants Due to their divergent traits, females and males can interact with heterospecific individuals differently, as demonstrated in competitive (Butler et al 2007, Wagner et al 2012), predator–prey 1967, Ryan et al 1982, Sakashita 1992, Sommer 2000, Costantini et al 2007, Tobler et al 2008, Kwieci nski et al.2017), plant–herbivore (Agren et al 1999, Cole and Ashman 2005, Cornelissen and Stiling 2005, Vesakoski et al.2008, Tsuji and Sota 2010, 2013), plant–pollinator (Temeles et al 2009, Zhang and He 2017), and plant–pathogen (Agren et al 1999) interactions These studies suggest that sex-specific interactions have the potential to shape a range of communities within and across trophic levels. As they assemble into different compositions, host-associated communities can modify female and male host quality differently, causing the communities to diverge
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