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Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487
| ABSTRACT |
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The concentrations and relative abundances of aquatic hyphomycete conidia in water were followed during a three-year study in two headwater streams at Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory, North Carolina, using the membrane-filtration technique. After a one-year pretreatment period, one of the streams was enriched continuously with inorganic nutrients (N+P) for two years while the other stream served as the reference. This ecosystem-level nutrient manipulation resulted in concentrations of aquatic hyphomycete conidia in the water of the treated stream that were 4.56.9 times higher than the concentrations observed during the pretreatment period and in the reference stream. Nutrient enrichment led to an increase in the number of fungal species detected on each sampling date. Changes in dominance patterns and relative abundances of individual species also were detected after treatment. Nutrient addition stimulates the reproductive activity of aquatic hyphomycetes, their colonization success and fungal-mediated leaf-litter decomposition. Such changes in the activity of the fungal community might affect higher trophic levels in lotic ecosystems.
Key words: community structure, freshwater fungi, nitrogen, phosphorus, seasonal pattern
| INTRODUCTION |
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It was hypothesized that aquatic hyphomycetes might obtain inorganic nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) not only from their organic substrata (leaf litter, wood debris, etc.) but also directly from water passing by (Suberkropp 1995
, Suberkropp and Chauvet 1995
). Later, studies in laboratory microcosms demonstrated that elevated concentrations of nitrate and phosphate in water stimulate overall fungal activity and conidia production (Suberkropp 1998
, Sridhar and Bärlocher 2000
).
The aim of this study was to examine the effects of long-term, whole-stream nutrient enrichment on the community structure of aquatic hyphomycetes from concentrations of conidia in the water and to compare these data with those from a pretreatment period and a reference stream. Because most aquatic hyphomycetes form characteristic tetraradiate, branched or filiform conidia, the elegant technique introduced by Iqbal and Webster (1973)
to characterize aquatic hyphomycete communities in streams was used. It consists basically of passing a known amount of water through membrane filters and subsequently identifying and counting conidia trapped on the filter. The underlying assumption is that assemblages of conidia in transport reflect those developed on submerged organic substrata (Bärlocher 1982
); some conidia, however, may be introduced from terrestrial habitats (Bandoni 1981
, Sridhar and Bärlocher 1993
).
| MATERIALS AND METHODS |
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Pretreatment observations of both streams were initiated in Apr 1999, and nutrient addition was started in stream 54 on 11 Jul 2000, while stream 53 continued to serve as a reference. Treatment stream 54 was enriched with nitrogen and phosphorus (ammonium nitrate and potassium phosphate) with a pump 145 m above the sampling site that added a concentrated solution into a pipe fed with stream water that was laid in the streambed and continued to within 10 m of the downstream flume. The amount of nutrients added was proportional to instantaneous discharge and was controlled by a data logger. The pipe had 18 openings (an average of 8 m apart) down the stream, letting nutrient solution drip into the stream over its entire length (Gulis and Suberkropp 2003a
). Nutrient addition resulted in elevated ammonium-N (100 µg L-1, mean during 24 mo of treatment), nitrate-N (283 µg L-1) and SRP (46 µg L-1) that was determined from five water samples taken at approximately 25 m intervals along the stream twice a month (J. Benstead, pers comm).
To determine concentrations and species composition of aquatic hyphomycete conidia, water samples were taken monthly over a 3 yr period (Apr 1999Jul 2002) at flumes 135 and 190 m downstream from the source of streams 53 and 54, respectively. Triplicate samples of stream water (300500 mL) were filtered through membrane filters (5 µm pore size, Millipore) at streamside (Iqbal and Webster 1973
), and conidia were stained with trypan blue in lactic acid (0.1%). Filters were taken to the laboratory where conidia were identified and counted (150 fields, Leitz Laborlux, 160x). Different amounts of water were filtered and subjected to counts of conidia on each date, due to the highly variable concentrations of suspended solids that interfered with conidia observation and according to anticipated conidia concentrations. To meaningfully compare species richness, we adjusted all conidia counts to the smallest sample volume (3 x 300 mL) and used rarefaction (Krebs 1989
) to calculate the expected number of species corresponding to the adjusted number of conidia in each sample. In other words, we chose to use the volume of water sampled and not the number of conidia (individuals) to standardize species richness (see Bärlocher and Graça 2002
for discussion).
Mean aquatic hyphomycete conidia concentrations and numbers of species in the water of stream 53 and 54 were compared both before and after treatment periods with paired t-tests. Conidia concentrations were log10 transformed before analyses. To find out whether treatment indeed caused the changes in conidia concentrations, we performed randomized intervention analysis (RIA, Carpenter et al 1989
). Despite recent criticism (Murtaugh 2002
), we believe that this analysis was appropriate in our case because the three half-series means (mean pretreatment conidia concentrations in both streams and mean post-treatment concentration in the reference stream) were very similar and temporal differences between streams were not clearly pronounced. Sorensen's quantitative similarity indexes (Magurran 1988
) were calculated as:
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| RESULTS |
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Cluster and correspondence analyses also reflected changes in aquatic hyphomycete communities that took place after nutrient enrichment and allowed separation of the "54 after" fungal assemblage (Fig. 4). Increases in relative abundances of the conidia of Anguillospora filiformis, Tetrachaetum elegans and Tricladium chaetocladium were associated with nutrient addition (Table I, Fig. 4). Overall, 70.0 and 27.3% of the inertia were explained by dimension 1 and 2, respectively, of the correspondence analysis.
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| DISCUSSION |
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In addition to nutrient concentrations, two important factors that affect production of conidia are temperature (cf. Figs. 1 and 2A) and presence of leaf litter in the stream. Headwater streams at Coweeta have relatively high leaf-litter standing stocks throughout the year (Suberkropp, unpubl data). This, coupled with naturally very low N and P concentrations and relatively warm winter temperatures, results in small fluctuations in conidia concentrations throughout the year (stream 53, Fig. 2A, cf. Suberkropp and Wallace 1992
) rather than large peaks during the autumn-winter that are common in many temperate streams (Iqbal and Webster 1973
, Bärlocher and Rosset 1981
, Shearer and Webster 1985b
, Suberkropp 1997
, Gönczöl and Révay 1999
, Bärlocher 2000
). Nutrient enrichment of stream 54, however, led to clear seasonal peaks coinciding with or lagging slightly behind the main leaf-litter inputs in autumn (stream 54 Nov 2000 and 2001, Fig. 2A). Smaller peaks were also observed in spring.
Several studies have provided indications that water chemistry and inorganic nutrients in particular, affect conidia production to a greater extent than fungal biomass accrual and microbially mediated leaf-litter decomposition (Suberkropp 1995
, Suberkropp and Chauvet 1995
, Grattan and Suberkropp 2001
). These observations also were confirmed by experiments in laboratory microcosms (Suberkropp 1998
, Sridhar and Bärlocher 2000
). Increased concentrations of conidia in streams with high nutrient concentrations should result in more efficient/faster colonization of new substrata. Once established on plant litter, fungi grow faster with higher nutrient availability (Grattan and Suberkropp 2001
, Gulis and Suberkropp 2003a
) and because of their relatively short lifecycle soon produce more conidia. This stimulation of fungal activity leads to the faster disappearance of leaf litter from the stream, which might affect leaf-shredding invertebrates and stream food webs.
Aquatic hyphomycetes allocate up to 80% of their production to conidia (Suberkropp 1991
), and the proportion can vary depending on nutrient availability (Suberkropp 1995
). Because fungal yield coefficients for decomposing submerged leaf litter were estimated to vary between 131%, being higher (1531%) at increased nutrient availability (Suberkropp 1991
, 1995
, Weyers and Suberkropp 1996
, Sridhar and Bärlocher 2000
, Gulis and Suberkropp 2003b
, c
), this results in a significant amount of leaf carbon being lost as conidia. In laboratory microcosms, Articulospora tetracladia converted 1.5 and 12% of leaf mass loss to conidia at low and high nutrient concentrations, respectively (Gulis and Suberkropp 2003c
). For leaf litter colonized by a natural microbial assemblage in a headwater stream and then incubated in laboratory microcosms at different levels of nutrients, the difference was even greater0.04 and 4.0% of leaf mass loss was converted to conidia at low and high N and P concentrations, respectively (Gulis and Suberkropp 2003b
). Consequently, in streams with higher nutrient concentrations, more conidia, i.e., more fine-particulate organic carbon, will be produced with the potential to be transported out of a stream and lost to local food webs.
Species richness of aquatic hyphomycetes in stream 54 after nutrient addition was higher than in the reference stream on each sampling date after late fall 2000 (Fig. 2B). This presumably was due to uneven increase in sporulation by aquatic hyphomycetes that enhanced the detection of rare species. We also noticed shifts in the relative contributions of the dominant species (Fig. 3). In contrast, Sridhar and Bärlocher (2000)
did not find shifts in species composition in response to nutrient addition in a laboratory experiment. It is not clear why elevated nutrient concentrations affected the relative abundances of some dominant species. We noted that all three species that significantly increased in abundance after nutrient addition (Anguillospora filiformis, Tetrachaetum elegans and Tricladium chaetocladium; Table I, Fig. 4) have relatively large conidia in comparison to spore size of species dominant during pretreatment period or in the reference stream (Alatospora acuminata and Articulospora tetracladia). Perhaps production of conidia with higher biovolume requires additional inorganic nutrient supply because it has been suggested that N and P obtained from the water are mainly shunted to sporulation by aquatic hyphomycetes (Suberkropp 1998
). Additional studies on the physiological requirements of particular species are needed to address this question. Interspecific interactions also may be modified at different nutrient levels.
The effects of long-term, whole-stream, nutrient enrichment on aquatic fungi has received little attention in the literature. We previously compared fungal biomass, leaf-litter decomposition and aquatic hyphomycete conidia in transport in the upstream, unenriched reach of stream 54 with that occurring in the nutrient-enriched downstream reach in a shorter (8 mo) study (Gulis and Suberkropp 2003a
). Concentrations of conidia were higher in the downstream reach, and some shifts in dominance pattern similar to those observed in our study occurred. It is evident from the results of these studies that nutrient enrichment of a small woodland stream (including anthropogenic eutrophication) can result in higher concentrations of aquatic hyphomycete conidia in transport and changes in fungal community structure. Because these changes are coupled to faster leaf-litter colonization, higher decomposition rates (Gulis and Suberkropp 2003a
) and presumably increased transport of fine particulate organic matter downstream, such enrichment might have consequences for the invertebrate fauna feeding on submerged decaying organic matter and on the higher trophic levels in such streams.
| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
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| FOOTNOTES |
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Accepted for publication May 30, 2003.
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