An important mechanism promoting species coexistence is conspecific negative density dependence(CNDD),which inhibits conspecific neighbors by accumulating host-specific enemies near adult trees.Natural enemies may be ...An important mechanism promoting species coexistence is conspecific negative density dependence(CNDD),which inhibits conspecific neighbors by accumulating host-specific enemies near adult trees.Natural enemies may be genotype-specific and regulate offspring dynamics more strongly than non-offspring,which is often neglected due to the difficulty in ascertaining genetic relatedness.Here,we investigated whether offspring and non-offspring of a dominant species,Castanopsis eyrei,suffered from different strength of CNDD based on parentage assignment in a subtropical forest.We found decreased recruitment efficiency(proxy of survival probability)of offspring compared with non-offspring near adult trees during the seedling-sapling transition,suggesting genotype-dependent interactions drive tree demographic dynamics.Furthermore,the genetic similarity between individuals of same cohort decreased in late life history stages,indicating genetic-relatedness-dependent tree mortality throughout ontogeny.Our results demonstrate that within-species genetic relatedness significantly affects the strength of CNDD,implying genotype-specific natural enemies may contribute to population dynamics in natural forests.展开更多
基金supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences(XDB31000000)the National Key Research and Development Program of China(2017YFA0605103)funded by the US National Science Foundation(NSF DEB-2029997)。
文摘An important mechanism promoting species coexistence is conspecific negative density dependence(CNDD),which inhibits conspecific neighbors by accumulating host-specific enemies near adult trees.Natural enemies may be genotype-specific and regulate offspring dynamics more strongly than non-offspring,which is often neglected due to the difficulty in ascertaining genetic relatedness.Here,we investigated whether offspring and non-offspring of a dominant species,Castanopsis eyrei,suffered from different strength of CNDD based on parentage assignment in a subtropical forest.We found decreased recruitment efficiency(proxy of survival probability)of offspring compared with non-offspring near adult trees during the seedling-sapling transition,suggesting genotype-dependent interactions drive tree demographic dynamics.Furthermore,the genetic similarity between individuals of same cohort decreased in late life history stages,indicating genetic-relatedness-dependent tree mortality throughout ontogeny.Our results demonstrate that within-species genetic relatedness significantly affects the strength of CNDD,implying genotype-specific natural enemies may contribute to population dynamics in natural forests.
