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83
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Introduction
My research focuses on soil-living microarthropods, their evolution, community structure and genetic diversity.
I'd like to understand why there are so many species of apparently similar functions coexist in soils, why genetic diversity is so high in soil microarthropods.
For this I use molecular markers, phylogenetic tools and ecological traits to combine ecological and evolutionary views. It is important to me, to unerstand the temporal context in which ecological functions evolved.
Understanding the function of parthenogenetic reproduction in soil-living animals is one of my favourite questions.
Publications
Publications (83)
Metabarcoding of Enchytraeidae (Annelida) communities
Earthworms are keystone animals stimulating litter decomposition and nutrient cycling. However, earthworms comprise diverse species which live in different soil layers and consume different types of food. Microorganisms in the gut of earthworms are likely to contribute significantly to their ability to digest organic matter, but this may vary among...
A reliable phylogeny is crucial for understanding the evolution and radiation of animal taxa. Phylogenies based on morphological data may be misleading due to frequent convergent evolution of traits—a problem from which molecular phylogenies suffer less. This may be particularly relevant in oribatid mites, an ancient soil animal taxon with more tha...
The extraradical mycelium of mycorrhizal fungi is among the major carbon pools in soil that is hard to quantitatively assess in-situ. Established method of in-growth mesh bags in temperate ecosystems is difficult to apply in the tropics, where mesh bags are often damaged by termites. Here we introduce a modification of the in-growth mesh bag techni...
Belowground invertebrate communities are dominated by species-rich and very small microarthropods that require long handling times and high taxonomic expertise for species determination. Molecular based methods like metabarcoding circumvent the morphological determination process by assigning taxa bioinformatically based on sequence information. Th...
Biodiversity loss and its potential threat on ecosystem functions call for a critical evaluation of human impacts on forest ecosystems. Management practices based on stand diversification offer a possible solution to biodiversity loss due to monoculture plantations, and these practices often involve planting introduced tree species. Although introd...
Forest soils are a critical component of terrestrial ecosystems and host a large number of animal decomposer species. One diverse and abundant decomposer taxon is oribatid mites (Acari: Oribatida), whose species composition varies with forest type and tree species composition. We used functional traits that indicate different niche dimensions, to i...
Lignocellulose is a major component of vascular plant biomass. Its decomposition is crucial for the terrestrial carbon cycle. Microorganisms are considered primary decomposers, but evidence increases that some invertebrates may also decompose lignocellulose. We investigated the taxonomic distribution and evolutionary origins of GH45 hydrolases, imp...
Exploring species and their functional diversity is of fundamental importance in biology and ecology. Many earthworm species comprise a wide range of genetic lineages/cryptic species, but it remains unclear whether these lineages/cryptic species represent distinct ecological entities that differ in traits. We barcoded 280 individuals of the earthwo...
Lignocellulose is a major component of plant biomass. Its decomposition is crucial for the terrestrial carbon cycle. Microorganisms are considered as primary decomposers and evidence increases that some invertebrates may also decompose lignocellulose. We investigated the taxonomic distribution and evolutionary origins of GH45 cellulases in a collec...
Mycorrhizal fungi play a vital role in soil processes and form a large part of belowground biodiversity in tropic ecosystems. Unlike temperate forests, many tree species in tropical stands are dominated by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), which form high amount of extraradical mycelium and even rhizomorphs, penetrating both soil and leaf litter....
A variety of human activities have been identified as driving factors for the release and spread of invasive earthworm species in North America. Population genetic markers can help to identify locally relevant anthropogenic vectors and provide insights into the processes of population dispersal and establishment. We sampled the invasive European ea...
Knowledge of the trophic ecology of soil animals is important for understanding their high alpha diversity as well as their functional role in soil food webs and systems. In the last 20 years, the analysis of natural variations in stable isotope ratios (15N/14N, 13C/12C) has revolutionized our view on soil animal trophic ecology. Here, we review th...
Not all individuals are the same. How this applies to soil-living creatures received little attention. Within-species variability determines the niche differentiation of coexisting species. To better understand trophic generalism, we analyzed the stable isotope ratio of 15N/14N in 28 species of oribatid mites, covering parthenogenetic and sexual sp...
A variety of human activities have been identified as driving factors for the release and spread of invasive earthworm species in North America. Population genetic markers can help to identify locally relevant anthropogenic vectors and provide insights into the processes of population dispersal and establishment. We sampled the invasive European ea...
Sex is evolutionarily more costly than parthenogenesis, evolutionary ecologists therefore wonder why sex is much more frequent than parthenogenesis in the majority of animal lineages. Intriguingly, parthenogenetic individuals and species are as common as or even more common than sexuals in some major and putative ancient animal lineages such as ori...
Oribatid mites are tiny arthropods that are common in all soils of the world; however, they also occur in microhabitats above the soil such as lichens, mosses, on the bark of trees and in suspended soils. For understanding oribatid mite community structure, it is important to know whether they are dispersal limited. The aim of this study was to inv...
Soil organisms drive major ecosystem functions by mineralising carbon and releasing nutrients during decomposition processes, which supports plant growth, aboveground biodiversity and, ultimately, human nutrition. Soil ecologists often operate with functional groups to infer the effects of individual taxa on ecosystem functions and services. Simult...
Finding a partner and having sex to produce babies is a common way to reproduce. Yet, upon closer look, we see that nature provides many ways for reproduction. What about a world without males? What first sounds impossible is the reality for many organisms that reproduce asexually, meaning without having sex. Females produce daughters that are clon...
Significance
Putatively ancient asexual species pose a challenge to theory because they appear to escape the predicted negative long-term consequences of asexuality. Although long-term asexuality is difficult to demonstrate, specific signatures of haplotype divergence, called the “Meselson effect,” are regarded as strong support for long-term asexu...
Deforestation, plantation expansion, and other human activities in tropical ecosystems are often associated with biological invasions. These processes have been studied for above-ground organisms, but associated changes below the ground have received little attention. We surveyed rainforest and plantation systems in Jambi province, Sumatra, Indones...
Rainforest conversion into monoculture plantations results in species loss and community shifts across animal taxa. The effect of such conversion on the role of ecophysiological properties influencing communities, and conversion effects on phylogenetic diversity and community assembly mechanisms, however, are rarely studied in the same context. Her...
Sex strongly impacts genome evolution via recombination and segregation. In the absence of these processes, haplotypes within lineages of diploid organisms are predicted to accumulate mutations independently of each other and diverge over time. This so-called ‘Meselson effect’ is regarded as a strong indicator of the long-term evolution under oblig...
The existence of old species-rich parthenogenetic taxa is a conundrum in evolutionary
biology. Such taxa point to ancient parthenogenetic radiations resulting in morphologically
distinct species. Ancient parthenogenetic taxa have been proposed to
exist in bdelloid rotifers, darwinulid ostracods, and in several taxa of acariform mites
(Acariformes,...
Generalistic interactions between predator and prey may vary with ecosystem type, predator traits, and prey traits, but the interplay of these factors has not been assessed in ground food webs.
We investigated trophic interactions of ground‐dwelling spiders across eight forests in European Russia associated with body size, hunting strategy, microha...
Aim:
Lumbricid earthworms are invasive across northern North America, causing notable changes in forest ecosystems. During their range expansion they encountered harsher climatic conditions compared to their native ranges in evolutionary short time. This study investigated if (1) dispersal barriers, (2) climatic selection, or (3) anthropogenic act...
The early evolution of ecosystems in Palaeozoic soils remains poorly understood because the fossil record is sparse, despite the preservation of soil microarthropods already from the Early Devonian (~410 Mya). The soil food web plays a key role in the functioning of ecosystems and its organisms currently express traits that have evolved over 400 my...
DNA sequence data and phylogenies are useful tools for species delimitation, especially in taxa comprising cryptic species. The Lepidocyrtus lanuginosus species group (Collembola: Entomobryidae) comprises three morphospecies and distinct cryptic species. We applied three DNA-based methods to delimit species boundaries in the L. lanuginosus species...
DNA sequence data and phylogenies are useful tools for species delimitation, especially in taxa comprising cryptic species. The Lepidocyrtus lanuginosus species group (Collembola: Entomobryidae) comprises three morphospecies and distinct cryptic species. We applied three DNA-based methods to delimit species boundaries in the L. lanuginosus species...
Front cover: The cover image of four common oribatid mite species in the families Galumnidae, Nothridae, Oppiidae, and Phthiracaridae, is based on the Research Paper Oribatid mites show how climate and latitudinal gradients in organic matter can drive large-scale biodiversity patterns of soil communities by Tancredi Caruso et al., DOI: 10.1111/jbi....
Aim
The factors determining spatial distributions and diversity of terrestrial invertebrates are typically investigated at small scales. Large‐scale studies are lacking for soil animals, which control microbial communities and represent one of the most diverse yet poorly known animal assemblages. Here, we analyzed a major group (Oribatida) to test...
High intraspecific genetic variance in Collembola indicates that cryptic species are widespread and this chal- lenges the delimitation of morphologically defined species. Lepidocyrtus lanuginosus (Gmelin, 1788) is a widely distributed habitat generalist with high genetic variance between populations from different locations in Europe. In this study...
European earthworms were introduced to North America by European settlers about 400 years ago. Human-mediated introductions significantly contributed to the spread of European species, which commonly are used as fishing bait and are often disposed deliberately in the wild. We investigated the genetic structure of Lumbricus terrestris in a 100km ran...
Sex is beneficial in the long term because it can prevent mutational meltdown through increased effectiveness of selection. This idea is supported by empirical evidence of deleterious mutation accumulation in species with a recent transition to asexuality. Here, we study the effectiveness of purifying selection in oribatid mites which have lost sex...
Functional traits determine the occurrence of species along environmental gradients and their coexistence with other species. Understanding how traits evolved among coexisting species helps to infer community assembly processes. We propose fatty acid composition in consumer tissue as a functional trait related to both food resources and physiologic...
Sex is beneficial in the long-term, because it can prevent mutational meltdown through increased effectiveness of selection. This idea is supported by empirical evidence of deleterious mutation accumulation in species with a recent transition to asexuality. Here, we studied the effectiveness of purifying selection in oribatid mites, which have lost...
Climatic and biome changes of the past million years influenced the population structure and genetic diversity of soil-living arthropods in Europe. However, their effects on the genetic structure of widespread and abundant soil animal species such as the Collembola Parisotoma notabilis remain virtually unknown. This generalist and parthenogenetic s...
Positions of lineage specific substitutions in the alignments of three genes (COI, Histone 3, 28S rDNA) of 120 individuals of Parisotoma notabilis sampled across Europe.
For COI, the amino acid alignment (aa) was analyzed, for Histone 3 the nucleotide (nct) alignment was investigated as all amino acid sequences were identical. The common characters...
Molecular divergence estimates of European Parisotoma notabilis calculated with BEAST based on the combined alignment.
The combined alignment included 28S rDNA, COI and H3, for age estimation we useda strict clock with a substitution rate of 2.3% for COI and estimated substitution rates for the other genes. The topology differs slightly from the CO...
Bayesian phylogeny of European lineages of Parisotoma notabilis based on single genes.
(A) Nucleotide sequences of the H3 gene and (B) the 28S rDNA (D3-D5 region). Numbers on nodes are posterior probabilities and bootstrap values.
(TIF)
Bayesian trees based on COI sequences of Parisotoma notablilis from Europe.
Molecular divergence estimates of European of P. notabilis calculated with BEAST based on a 500 bp alignment including all COI sequences from this study (n = 120) and from Porco et al. (2012) (n = 123). Numbers of different haplotypes (HT) are indicated in brackets next to...
Relationships among genetic lineages of Parisotoma notabilis in Europe based on Bayesian inference and the combined matrix and using codon models for the protein coding partitions.
(A) The M3 model applied to COI and H3, the mitochondrial code was set for the COI partition and the universal code for H3 (mrbayes block settings: outgroup 43; charset...
Accessionnumbres of DNA sequences of Parisotoma notabilis from Europe obtained in this study.
All sequences are available at NCBI GenBan. Countries, sampling locations and sampling coordinates are listed.
(PDF)
Values to estimate speciation among parthenogenetic lineages (Birky's 4x rule) for the five genetic lineages of Parisotoma notabilis sampled in Europe.
Lineages correspond to nodes connecting clades in Fig 2B, Lineages 1.1 and 1.2 are the two sister clades of Lineage 1 with 26 (L1.1) and 19 (L1.2) individuals. Nucleotide diversity (π), pairwise dif...
K/θ between highly supported clades of Parisotoma notabilis from Europe to estimate K for Birky's 4x rule.
K/θ ≥ 4 indicate that samples are from different species and K/θ ≤ 4 indicate that samples are from the same species. K is the observed sequence distance d from S2 Table corrected for multiple hits using GTR+G+I as estimated by TOPALI.θ values...
Diversity of most animal and plant taxa increases towards the equator. The reasons for this pattern are
manifold, but their relative importance is controversial. Understanding of the radiation of animal taxa is needed to uncover the mechanisms underlying latitudinal gradients in biodiversity. Species may have evolved more quickly in tropical region...
Background:
Climate oscillations in the Cenozoic reduced species richness and genetic diversity of terrestrial and aquatic animals and plants in central and northern Europe. The most abundant arthropods in temperate soils are Collembola that live in almost any soil-related habitat. Extant species show little morphological variation to Eocene fossi...
Convergent evolution is one of the main drivers of traits and phenotypes in
animals and plants. Here, we investigated the minimum number of independent colonisations
of marine and freshwater habitats in derived oribatid mites (Brachypylina), a
mainly terrestrial taxon. Furthermore, we investigated whether the reproductive mode
(sexual vs. thelytoko...
Transposable elements (TEs) and other repetitive DNA can accumulate in the absence of recombination, a process contributing to the degeneration of Y-chromosomes and other non-recombining genome portions. A similar accumulation of repetitive DNA is expected for asexually reproducing species, given their entire genome is effectively non-recombining....
Species of the genus Steganacarus are soil-living oribatid mites (Acari, Phthiracaridae) with a ptychoid body. The phylogeny and species status of the species of Steganacarus are not resolved, some authors group all ten German species of Steganacarus within the genus Steganacarus whereas others split them into three subgenera, Steganacarus, Tropaca...
Parthenogenetic lineages may colonize marginal areas of the range of related sexual species or coexist with sexual species in the same habitat. Frozen-Niche-Variation and General-Purpose-Genotype are two hypotheses suggesting that competition and interclonal selection result in parthenogenetic populations being either genetically diverse or rather...
Pleistocene glaciations forced many aboveground animals and plants to retreat to refugia in southern Europe from where central and northern Europe was recolonized during the present warm period. However, it is not clear if patterns of aboveground species also apply to species of the belowground system. Here, we use a mitochondrial (COI) and a nucle...
Leafhoppers (Hemiptera Cicadellidae Typhlocybinae) of the genus Eupteryx are important pests on medical and culinary herbs including sage (Salvia officinalis L., Lamiaceae), causing severe economic damage. Individuals of Eupteryx decemnotata Rey and Eupteryx melissae Curtis show a modified genital morphology at two geographically distant population...
Terrestrial fossils that document the early colonization of land are scarce for >100 my after the Cambrian explosion. This raises the question whether life on land did not exist or just did not fossilize. With a molecular dating technique, we analyzed the origin of terrestrial chelicerate microarthropods (Acari, Oribatida) which have a fossil recor...
It has been hypothesized that in ancient apomictic, nonrecombining lineages the two alleles of a single copy gene will become highly divergent as a result of the independent accumulation of mutations (Meselson effect). We used a partial sequence of the elongation factor-1alpha (ef-1alpha) and the heat shock protein 82 (hsp82) genes to test this hyp...