Meeting Abstract
Symbiosis is an integral part of life, with most organisms on Earth engaged in symbiotic interactions ranging from mutualistic to parasitic. Classic studies into symbioses looked at simple pairwise interactions, like clownfish and sea anemones or pearlfish and sea cucumbers. However, focusing on these pairwise interactions ignores the ways in which complex communities of hosts and symbionts affect each other. Symbiosis research has not yet taken full advantage of metacommunity theory, which describes interactions between spatially disparate communities of organisms affecting each other through dispersal. Traditionally, this paradigm has been used to study communities along connected environmental patches. However, if we consider a host to be a patch, we can use metacommunity theory to study how host controls, symbiont interactions, and dispersal affect the structure and diversity of symbiont communities. We have developed a framework based on classical tradeoffs in community ecology to help understand and categorize the attributes of both host and symbiont organisms that lead to successful maintenance of a symbiosis. We propose that most of the diversity in regional symbiont communities (i.e. between hosts) is maintained by the colonization ability of a symbiont trading off with traits that increase symbiont fitness on a host, such as competitive ability, fecundity, and interaction intensity, as well as traits of the individual host and the abiotic environment. We have also used this framework to demonstrate the ways global change can decouple symbioses.
