Disruption of a belowground mutualism alters interactions between plants and their floral visitors

Ecology
James F CahillBryon H Shore

Abstract

Plants engage in diverse and intimate interactions with unrelated taxa. For example, aboveground floral visitors provide pollination services, while belowground arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) enhance nutrient capture. Traditionally in ecology, these processes were studied in isolation, reinforcing the prevailing assumption that these above- and belowground processes were also functionally distinct. More recently, there has been a growing realization that the soil surface is not a barrier to many ecological interactions, particularly those involving plants (who live simultaneously above and below ground). Because of the potentially large impact that mycorrhizae and floral visitors can have on plant performance and community dynamics, we designed an experiment to test whether these multi-species mutualisms were interdependent under field conditions. Using benomyl, a widely used fungicide, we suppressed AMF in a native grassland, measuring plant, fungal, and floral-visitor responses after three years of fungal suppression. AMF suppression caused a shift in the community of floral visitors from large-bodied bees to small-bodied bees and flies, and reduced the total number of floral visits per flowering stem 67% across the 23 fl...Continue Reading

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