Abstract
Abstract Growing interest in understanding the relevance of marine fungi to food webs, biogeochemical cycling, and biological patterns necessitates establishing a context for interpreting future findings. To help establish this context, we summarize the diversity of cultured and observed marine planktonic fungi from across the world. While exploring this diversity, we discovered that only half of the known marine fungal species have a publicly available DNA locus, which we hypothesize will likely hinder accurate high-throughput sequencing classification in the future, as it does currently. Still, we reprocessed >600 high-throughput datasets and analyzed 4.9 × 109 sequences (4.8 × 109 shotgun metagenomic reads and 1.0 × 108 amplicon sequences) and found that every fungal phylum is represented in the global marine planktonic mycobiome; however, this mycobiome is generally predominated by three phyla: the Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, and Chytridiomycota. We hypothesize that these three clades are the most abundant due to a combination of evolutionary histories, as well as physical processes that aid in their dispersal. We found that environments with atypical salinity regimes (>5 standard deviations from the global mean: Red Sea, Baltic Sea, sea ice) hosted higher proportions of the Chytridiomycota, relative to open oceans that are dominated by Dikarya. The Baltic Sea and Mediterranean Sea had the highest fungal richness of all areas explored. An analysis of similarity identified significant differences between oceanographic regions. There were no latitudinal gradients of marine fungal richness and diversity observed. As more high-throughput sequencing data become available, expanding the collection of reference loci and genomes will be essential to understanding the ecology of marine fungi.
Highlights
The Fungi are globally distributed members of marine ecosystems (Tisthammer et al 2016, Morales et al 2019), whose abundances are tied to phytoplankton (Taylor and Cunliffe 2016), organic matter (Ortega-Arbulú et al 2018), and elevated photon fluxes (Hassett and Gradinger 2016)
We found that environments with atypical salinity regimes (>5 standard deviations from the global mean: Red Sea, Baltic Sea, sea ice) hosted higher proportions of the Chytridiomycota, relative to open oceans aBrandon T
By reviewing the biogeography of marine planktonic fungi, we discovered significant gaps in scientific knowledge that challenge our understanding of marine fungal ecology
Summary
The Fungi are globally distributed members of marine ecosystems (Tisthammer et al 2016, Morales et al 2019), whose abundances are tied to phytoplankton (Taylor and Cunliffe 2016), organic matter (Ortega-Arbulú et al 2018), and elevated photon fluxes (Hassett and Gradinger 2016). Even though fungi comprise substantial quantities of biomass in the marine realm (Gutiérrez et al 2011, Bochdansky et al 2017, Hassett et al 2019), their activity is not represented in marine ecosystem models (Worden et al 2015). Marine fungi behave as saprobes and symbionts that can recycle nutrients (Gutiérrez et al 2011). This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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