4.6 Article

Plant performance response to eight different types of symbiosis

Journal

NEW PHYTOLOGIST
Volume 222, Issue 1, Pages 526-542

Publisher

WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/nph.15392

Keywords

ant-plant interactions; dark septate endophytes; functional traits; leaf endophytes; mycorrhizas; nitrogen-fixing bacteria; plant ecological strategy; plant growth

Categories

Funding

  1. Australian Research Council
  2. TRY initiative on plant traits
  3. DIVERSITAS/Future Earth
  4. German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig

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Almost all plant species interact with one or more symbioses somewhere within their distribution range. Bringing together plant trait data and growth responses to symbioses spanning 552 plant species, we provide for the first time on a large scale (597 studies) a quantitative synthesis on plant performance differences between eight major types of symbiosis, including mycorrhizas, N-fixing bacteria, fungal endophytes and ant-plant interactions. Frequency distributions of plant growth responses varied considerably between different types of symbiosis, in terms of both mean effect and 'risk', defined here as percentage of experiments reporting a negative effect of symbiosis on plants. Contrary to expectation, plant traits were poor predictors of growth response across and within all eight symbiotic associations. Our analysis showed no systematic additive effect when a host plant engaged in two functionally different symbioses. This synthesis suggests that plant species' ecological strategies have little effect in determining the influence of a symbiosis on host plant growth. Reliable quantification of differences in plant performance across symbioses will prove valuable for developing general hypotheses on how species become engaged in mutualisms without a guarantee of net returns.

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