TY - JOUR T1 - Soil Protists in Three Neotropical Rainforests are Hyperdiverse and Dominated by Parasites JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/050997 SP - 050997 AU - Frédéric Mahé AU - Colomban de Vargas AU - David Bass AU - Lucas Czech AU - Alexandros Stamatakis AU - Enrique Lara AU - Jordan Mayor AU - John Bunge AU - Sarah Sernaker AU - Tobias Siemensmeyer AU - Isabelle Trautmann AU - Sarah Romac AU - Cédric Berney AU - Alexey Kozlov AU - Edward A. D. Mitchell AU - Christophe V.W. Seppey AU - David Singer AU - Elianne Egge AU - Rainer Wirth AU - Gabriel Trueba AU - Micah Dunthorn Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/29/050997.abstract N2 - Although animals and plants in tropical rainforests are known to be hyperdiverse within and between communities, it is unknown if similar patterns are reflected at the microbial scale with unicellular eukaryotes or protists. Using environmental DNA sequencing of soils sampled in rainforests from Costa Rica, Panama, and Ecuador, we found that the Apicomplexa dominated the protist communities; these parasites potentially promote animal diversity in the forests by reducing population growth rates in a density-dependent manner similar to the Janzen-Connell hypothesis for tropical trees. Extremely high OTU diversity and high OTU turnover between samples within the same forests suggest that protists, not arthropods, are the most diverse eukaryotes in tropical rainforests, and that rainforest soil protists are at least as diverse, and potentially more diverse, than those in the marine plankton. ER -