Abstract
Despite fungi playing an important role in nutrient decomposition in aquatic ecosystems and being considered as vital actors in the ecological processes, they received limited attention regarding the community in aquaculture pond sediments which are extremely important and typically disturbed habitats. Using an ITS1 region of fungal rDNA, this study aimed to investigate sediment fungal communities in fish, crab, and crayfish ponds for decades of farming practices at representative aquaculture regions in the middle Yangtze River basin, China. We then aimed to explore the community patterns associated with species-based farming practices in the ponds at 18 farms. The results showed that the pond sediments harbored more than 9,000 operational taxonomic units. The sediments had significantly higher alpha diversity in crab ponds compared to that in fish and crayfish ponds. The fungal phyla largely belonged to Ascomycota and Chytridiomycota, and the dominance of Rozellomycota over Basidiomycota and Aphelidiomycota was observed. The majority of sediment fungal members were ascribed to unclassified fungi, with higher proportions in fish ponds than crab and crayfish ponds. Further, the fungal communities were markedly distinct among the three types of ponds, suggesting divergent patterns of fungal community assemblages caused by farming practices in aquaculture ponds. The community diversity and structure were closely correlated to sediment properties, especially sediment carbon content and pH. Thus, the distribution and pattern of fungal communities in the sediments appear to primarily depend on species-based farming practices responsible for the resulting sediment carbon content and pH in aquaculture ponds. This study provides a detailed snapshot and extension of understanding fungal community structure and variability in pond ecosystems, highlighting the impacts of farming practices on the assembly and succession of sediment fungal communities in aquaculture ponds.
Highlights
Fungi are important members of the ecosystem, covering a wide diversity of lineages that have thrived in biospheres (Richards et al, 2012; Tedersoo et al, 2014) where they comprise non-ignorable proportions of microbial community populations
Sediments had higher Total nitrogen (TN) and Total phosphorus (TP) concentrations for crab ponds (2.98 ± 0.20 and 1.62 ± 0.36 g kg−1), yet the differences were not found between fish ponds and crayfish ponds (Table 1)
The present study represents an attempt to investigate the fungal community in sediments across different aquaculture ponds
Summary
Fungi are important members of the ecosystem, covering a wide diversity of lineages that have thrived in biospheres (Richards et al, 2012; Tedersoo et al, 2014) where they comprise non-ignorable proportions of microbial community populations. Freshwater ecosystems are generally subdivided into running (such as lentic lakes and ponds) and standing (such as lotic streams and rivers) waters, with significant differences in fungal communities between lotic and lentic freshwater habitats such as rivers and lakes (Grossart et al, 2019) depending on human activities and climate changes (Wang et al, 2020). This might be attributed to the heterogeneity of sediment substrates and the surrounding environments. Marine farming practices and fertilization-related agricultural practices can regulate fungal communities in environmental systems (Guo et al, 2015), further suggesting that the fungal community patterns may change with different practices in freshwater ponds
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