Convergence between the microcosms of Southeast Asian and North American pitcher plants
- Harvard University, United States
- Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Malaysia
- University of Malaya, Malaysia
- University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States
Abstract
The 'pitchers' of carnivorous pitcher plants are exquisite examples of convergent evolution. An open question is whether the living communities housed in pitchers also converge in structure or function. Using samples from more than 330 field-collected pitchers of eight species of Southeast Asian Nepenthes and six species of North American Sarracenia, we demonstrate that the pitcher microcosms, or miniature ecosystems with complex communities, are strikingly similar. Compared to communities from surrounding habitats, pitcher communities house fewer species. While communities associated with the two genera contain different microbial organisms and arthropods, the species are predominantly from the same phylogenetic clades. Microbiomes from both genera are enriched in degradation pathways and have high abundances of key degradation enzymes. Moreover, in a manipulative field experiment, Nepenthes pitchers placed in a North American bog assembled Sarracenia-like communities. An understanding of the convergent interactions in pitcher microcosms facilitates identification of selective pressures shaping the communities.
Data availability
Amplicon sequencing data have been deposited as NCBI BioProject PRJNA448553: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/PRJNA448553. Metagenomic sequencing data have been deposited in MG-RAST: http://www.mg-rast.org/linkin.cgi?project=mgp15454. The source code and data for Figures 1-5 and for Tables S3 and S4 have been deposited in a Harvard Dataverse repository: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QYUBN2.
-
Amplicon sequencing dataNCBI BioProject PRJNA448553.
Article and author information
Author details
Leonora S Bittleston
Funding
National Science Foundation (NSF Graduate Fellowship and Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant DEB-1400982)
- Leonora S Bittleston
Templeton Foundation (Foundational Questions In Evolutionary Biology)
- Naomi E Pierce
- Anne Pringle
Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology Putnam Expedition Grant (Putnam Grant)
- Leonora S Bittleston
National Geographic Society
- Naomi E Pierce
University of Malaya High Impact Research Grant (UM-MOHE HIR Grant UM.C/625/1/HIR/MOHE/CHAN/14/1)
- Kok Gan Chan
National Science Foundation (SES-0750480)
- Naomi E Pierce
University of Malaya High Impact Research Grant (H-50001-A000027)
- Kok Gan Chan
University of Malaya High Impact Research Grant (A-000001-50001)
- Kok Gan Chan
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Dianne K Newman, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, California Institute of Technology, United States
Version history
- Received: March 16, 2018
- Accepted: August 8, 2018
- Accepted Manuscript published: August 28, 2018 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: September 10, 2018 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2018, Bittleston et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 3,700
- views
-
- 407
- downloads
-
- 28
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Convergence between the microcosms of Southeast Asian and North American pitcher plants
eLife 7:e36741.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.36741
Further reading
-
- Computational and Systems Biology
- Ecology
Collaborative hunting, in which predators play different and complementary roles to capture prey, has been traditionally believed to be an advanced hunting strategy requiring large brains that involve high-level cognition. However, recent findings that collaborative hunting has also been documented in smaller-brained vertebrates have placed this previous belief under strain. Here, using computational multi-agent simulations based on deep reinforcement learning, we demonstrate that decisions underlying collaborative hunts do not necessarily rely on sophisticated cognitive processes. We found that apparently elaborate coordination can be achieved through a relatively simple decision process of mapping between states and actions related to distance-dependent internal representations formed by prior experience. Furthermore, we confirmed that this decision rule of predators is robust against unknown prey controlled by humans. Our computational ecological results emphasize that collaborative hunting can emerge in various intra- and inter-specific interactions in nature, and provide insights into the evolution of sociality.
-
- Ecology
- Evolutionary Biology
Seasonal animal dormancy is widely interpreted as a physiological response for surviving energetic challenges during the harshest times of the year (the physiological constraint hypothesis). However, there are other mutually non-exclusive hypotheses to explain the timing of animal dormancy, that is, entry into and emergence from hibernation (i.e. dormancy phenology). Survival advantages of dormancy that have been proposed are reduced risks of predation and competition (the ‘life-history’ hypothesis), but comparative tests across animal species are few. Using the phylogenetic comparative method applied to more than 20 hibernating mammalian species, we found support for both hypotheses as explanations for the phenology of dormancy. In accordance with the life-history hypotheses, sex differences in hibernation emergence and immergence were favored by the sex difference in reproductive effort. In addition, physiological constraint may influence the trade-off between survival and reproduction such that low temperatures and precipitation, as well as smaller body mass, influence sex differences in phenology. We also compiled initial evidence that ectotherm dormancy may be (1) less temperature dependent than previously thought and (2) associated with trade-offs consistent with the life-history hypothesis. Thus, dormancy during non-life-threatening periods that are unfavorable for reproduction may be more widespread than previously thought.
