Foraging ants affect community composition and diversity of phyllosphere fungi on a myrmecophilous plants, 𝘔𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘵𝘶𝘴 𝘫𝘢𝘱𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘴

Abstract

Many microorganisms inhabit the aboveground parts of plants (i.e. the phyllosphere), which mainly comprise leaves. Understanding the structure of phyllosphere microbial communities and their drivers is important because they influence host plant fitness and ecosystem functions. Despite the high prevalence of ant–plant associations, few studies have used quantitative community data to investigate the effects of ants on phyllosphere microbial communities. In the present study, we investigated the effects of ants on the phyllosphere fungal communities of 𝘔𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘵𝘶𝘴 𝘫𝘢𝘱𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘴 using high-throughput sequencing. 𝘔𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘵𝘶𝘴 𝘫𝘢𝘱𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘴 is a myrmecophilous plants that bears extrafloral nectaries, attracting several ant species, but does not provide specific ant species with nest sites like myrmecophytes do. We experimentally excluded ants with sticky resins from the target plants and collected leaf discs to extract fungal DNA. The ribosomal DNA internal transcribed spacer 1 (ITS1) regions of the phyllosphere fungi were amplified and sequenced to obtain fungal community data. Our results showed that the exclusion of ants changed the phyllosphere fungal community composition; however, the effect of ants on OTU richness was not clear. These results indicate that ants can change the community of phyllosphere fungi, even if the plant is not a myrmecophyte.