Journal
ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
Volume 11, Issue 14, Pages 9543-9552Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/ece3.7772
Keywords
community assembly; ecosystem services; metabarcoding; niche partitioning; trophic interactions
Categories
Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [31230061, 31320103922]
- State Key Laboratory of Ecological Pest Control for Fujian and Taiwan Crops [2020L3007]
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This study used high-throughput sequencing and biotic interaction networks to analyze the predation spectrum of spiders, highlighting interactions between predators and their prey. The results underscore the importance of spiders as predators in complex trophic networks and provide evidence for targeted conservation biological control efforts.
Inter- and intra-guild interactions are important in the coexistence of predators and their prey, especially in highly disturbed vegetable cropping systems with sporadic food resources. Assessing the dietary range of a predator taxon characterized by diverse foraging behavior using conventional approaches, such as visual observation and conventional molecular approaches for prey detection, has serious logistical problems. In this study, we assessed the prey compositions and compare the dietary spectrum of a functionally diverge group of predators-spiders-to characterize their trophic interactions and assess biological control potential in Brassica vegetable fields. We used high-throughput sequencing (HTS) and biotic interaction networks to precisely annotate the predation spectrum and highlight the predator-predator and predator-prey interactions. The prey taxa in the gut of all spider families were mainly enriched with insects (including dipterans, coleopterans, orthopterans, hemipterans, and lepidopterans) with lower proportions of arachnids (such as Araneae) along with a wide range of other prey factions. Despite the generalist foraging behavior of spiders, the community structure analysis and interaction networks highlighted the overrepresentation of particular prey taxa in the gut of each spider family, as well as showing the extent of interfamily predation by spiders. Identifying the diverse trophic niche proportions underpins the importance of spiders as predators of pests in highly disturbed agroecosystems. More specifically, combining HTS with advanced ecological community analysis reveals the preferences and biological control potential of particular spider taxa (such as Salticidae against lepidopterans and Pisauridae against dipterans), and so provides a valuable evidence base for targeted conservation biological control efforts in complex trophic networks.
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