Predator richness increases the effect of prey diversity on prey yield

Muhammad Saleem, Ingo Fetzer, Carsten F. Dormann, Hauke Harms and Antonis Chatzinotas ()
Additional contact information
Muhammad Saleem: Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ, Permoserstrasse 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany
Ingo Fetzer: Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ, Permoserstrasse 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany
Carsten F. Dormann: Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ, Permoserstrasse 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany
Hauke Harms: Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ, Permoserstrasse 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany
Antonis Chatzinotas: Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ, Permoserstrasse 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany

Nature Communications, 2012, vol. 3, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Positive biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships are generally attributed to two mechanisms: complementarity and selection. These mechanisms have been primarily examined using plant communities, whereas bacterial communities remain largely unexplored. Moreover, it remains uncertain how predation by single or multiple predators affects these mechanisms. Here using 465 bacterial microcosms, we show that multiple predation by protists results in positive bacterial diversity effects on bacterial yields (colony-forming units) possibly due to an increased complementarity and evenness among bacterial species. By mathematically partitioning the biodiversity effects, we demonstrate that competitive interactions in diverse communities are reduced and the growth of subdominant species is enhanced. We envisage that, including diversity gradients at other trophic levels, in biodiversity-ecosystem functioning research is a key to understanding and managing ecosystem processes. Such level of manipulation can be achieved best in microbial model systems, which are powerful tools for fundamental hypothesis-driven experiments and the investigation of general ecological theories.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2287 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:3:y:2012:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms2287

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2287

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().