Biodiversität

Speciation rates vary considerably among lineages, and our understanding of what drives the rapid succession of speciation events within young adaptive radiations remains incomplete. The cichlid fish family provides a notable example of such variation, with many slowly speciating lineages as well as several exceptionally large and rapid radiations. Here, by reconstructing a large phylogeny of all currently described cichlid species, we show that explosive speciation is solely concentrated in species flocks of several large young lakes. Increases in the speciation rate are associated with the absence of top predators; however, this does not sufficiently explain explosive speciation. Across lake radiations, we observe a positive relationship between the speciation rate and enrichment of large insertion or deletion polymorphisms. Assembly of 100 cichlid genomes within the most rapidly speciating cichlid radiation, which is found in Lake Victoria, reveals exceptional 'genomic potential' - hundreds of ancient haplotypes bear insertion or deletion polymorphisms, many of which are associated with specific ecologies and shared with ecologically similar species from other older radiations elsewhere in Africa. Network analysis reveals fundamentally non-treelike evolution through recombining old haplotypes, and the origins of ecological guilds are concentrated early in the radiation. Our results suggest that the combination of ecological opportunity, sexual selection and exceptional genomic potential is the key to understanding explosive adaptive radiation.

Environmental change can alter species' abundances within communities consistently; for example, increasing all abundances by the same percentage, or more idiosyncratically. Here, we show how comparing effects of temperature on species grown in isolation and when grown together helps our understanding of how ecological communities more generally respond to environmental change. In particular, we find that the shape of the feasibility domain (the parameter space of carrying capacities compatible with positive species' abundances) helps to explain the composition of experimental microbial communities under changing environmental conditions. First, we introduce a measure to quantify the asymmetry of a community’s feasibility domain using the column vectors of the corresponding interaction matrix. These column vectors describe the effects each species has on all other species in the community (hereafter referred to as species' multidimensional effects). We show that as the asymmetry of the feasibility domain increases the relationship between species' abundance when grown together and when grown in isolation weakens. We then show that microbial communities experiencing different temperature environments exhibit patterns consistent with this theory. Specifically, communities at warmer temperatures show relatively more asymmetry; thus, the idiosyncrasy of responses is higher compared with that in communities at cooler temperatures. These results suggest that while species’ interactions are typically defined at the pairwise level, multispecies dynamics can be better understood by focusing on the effects of these interactions at the community level.

Many microorganisms face a fundamental trade-off between reproduction and survival: Rapid growth boosts population size but makes microorganisms sensitive to external stressors. Here, we show that starved bacteria encountering new resources can break this trade-off by evolving phenotypic heterogeneity in lag time. We quantify the distribution of single-cell lag times of populations of starved Escherichia coli and show that population growth after starvation is primarily determined by the cells with shortest lag due to the exponential nature of bacterial population dynamics. As a consequence, cells with long lag times have no substantial effect on population growth resumption. However, we observe that these cells provide tolerance to stressors such as antibiotics. This allows an isogenic population to break the trade-off between reproduction and survival. We support this argument with an evolutionary model which shows that bacteria evolve wide lag time distributions when both rapid growth resumption and survival under stressful conditions are under selection. Our results can explain the prevalence of antibiotic tolerance by lag and demonstrate that the benefits of phenotypic heterogeneity in fluctuating environments are particularly high when minorities with extreme phenotypes dominate population dynamics.

Ecological pyramids represent the distribution of abundance and biomass of living organisms across body-sizes. Our understanding of their expected shape relies on the assumption of invariant steady-state conditions. However, most of the world’s ecosystems experience disturbances that keep them far from such a steady state. Here, using the allometric scaling between population growth rate and body-size, we predict the response of size-abundance pyramids within a trophic guild to any combination of disturbance frequency and intensity affecting all species in a similar way. We show that disturbances narrow the base of size-abundance pyramids, lower their height and decrease total community biomass in a nonlinear way. An experimental test using microbial communities demonstrates that the model captures well the effect of disturbances on empirical pyramids. Overall, we demonstrate both theoretically and experimentally how disturbances that are not size-selective can nonetheless have disproportionate impacts on large species.

Human-induced global change dramatically alters individual aspects of river biodiversity, such as taxonomic, phylogenetic or functional diversity, and is predicted to lead to losses of associated ecosystem functions. Understanding these losses and dependencies are critical to human well-being. Until now, however, most studies have only looked either at individual organismal groups or single functions, and little is known on the effect of human activities on multitrophic biodiversity and on ecosystem multifunctionality in riverine ecosystem. Here we profiled biodiversity from bacteria to invertebrates based on environmental DNA (hereafter, 'eDNA') samples across a major river catchment in China, and analysed their dependencies with multiple ecosystem functions, especially linked to C/N/P-cycling. Firstly, we found a spatial cross-taxon congruence pattern of communities' structure in the network of the Shaying river, which was related to strong environmental filtering due to human land use. Secondly, human land use explained the decline of multitrophic and multifaceted biodiversity and ecosystem functions, but increased functional redundancy in the riverine ecosystem. Thirdly, biodiversity and ecosystem function relationships at an integrative level showed a concave-up (non-saturating) shape. Finally, structural equation modeling suggested that land use affects ecosystem functions through biodiversity-mediated pathways, including biodiversity loss and altered community interdependence in multitrophic groups. Our study highlights the value of a complete and inclusive assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem functions for an integrated land-use management of riverine ecosystems.