2 research outputs found
Caenorhabditis nematodes colonize ephemeral resource patches in neotropical forests
Abstract Factors shaping the distribution and abundance of species include lifeâhistory traits, population structure, and stochastic colonizationâextinction dynamics. Field studies of model species groups help reveal the roles of these factors. Species of Caenorhabditis nematodes are highly divergent at the sequence level but exhibit highly conserved morphology, and many of these species live in sympatry on microbeârich patches of rotten material. Here, we use field experiments and largeâscale opportunistic collections to investigate species composition, abundance, and colonization efficiency of Caenorhabditis species in two of the world's bestâstudied lowland tropical field sites: Barro Colorado Island in PanamĂĄ and La Selva in SarapiquĂ, Costa Rica. We observed seven species of Caenorhabditis, four of them known only from these collections. We formally describe two species and place them within the Caenorhabditis phylogeny. While these localities contain species from many parts of the phylogeny, both localities were dominated by globally distributed androdiecious species. We found that Caenorhabditis individuals were able to colonize baits accessible only through phoresy and preferentially colonized baits that were in direct contact with the ground. We estimate the number of colonization events per patch to be low