TY - JOUR
T1 - Diet disparity among sympatric herbivorous cichlids in the same ecomorphs in Lake Tanganyika
T2 - Amplicon pyrosequences on algal farms and stomach contents
AU - Hata, Hiroki
AU - Tanabe, Akifumi S.
AU - Yamamoto, Satoshi
AU - Toju, Hirokazu
AU - Kohda, Masanori
AU - Hori, Michio
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to members of the Maneno Team (Tanganyika Research Project Team) and staff of LTRU, Mpulungu, Zambia, for their support. We also thank two anonymous referees for critically reading the manuscript and providing helpful suggestions. This study is supported by Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B, nos 22770024, 25840159) for HH, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B, no. 22405010) for MK, JSPS KAKENHI Grant (No. 26711026) and the Funding Program for Next Generation World-Leading Researchers of Cabinet Office, the Government of Japan (GS014) for HT. The research presented here was conducted under permission of fish research in Lake Tanganyika from the Zambian Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Fisheries and complied with the current law in Zambia.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Hata et al.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - Background: Lake Tanganyika, an ancient lake in the Great Rift Valley, is famous for the adaptive radiation of cichlids. Five tribes of the Cichlidae family have acquired herbivory, with five ecomorphs: grazers, browsers, scrapers, biters and scoopers. Sixteen species of the herbivorous cichlids coexist on a rocky littoral slope in the lake. Seven of them individually defend feeding territories against intruding herbivores to establish algal farms. We collected epiphyton from these territories at various depths and also gathered fish specimens. Algal and cyanobacteria community structures were analysed using the amplicon-metagenomic method. Results: Based on 454-pyrosequencing of SSU rRNA gene sequences, we identified 300 phototrophic taxa, including 197 cyanobacteria, 57 bacillariophytes, and 31 chlorophytes. Algal farms differed significantly in their composition among cichlid species, even in the same ecomorph, due in part to their habitat-depth segregation. The algal species composition of the stomach contents and algal farms of each species differed, suggesting that cichlids selectively harvest their farms. The stomach contents were highly diverse, even between species in the same tribe, in the same feeding ecomorph.
AB - Background: Lake Tanganyika, an ancient lake in the Great Rift Valley, is famous for the adaptive radiation of cichlids. Five tribes of the Cichlidae family have acquired herbivory, with five ecomorphs: grazers, browsers, scrapers, biters and scoopers. Sixteen species of the herbivorous cichlids coexist on a rocky littoral slope in the lake. Seven of them individually defend feeding territories against intruding herbivores to establish algal farms. We collected epiphyton from these territories at various depths and also gathered fish specimens. Algal and cyanobacteria community structures were analysed using the amplicon-metagenomic method. Results: Based on 454-pyrosequencing of SSU rRNA gene sequences, we identified 300 phototrophic taxa, including 197 cyanobacteria, 57 bacillariophytes, and 31 chlorophytes. Algal farms differed significantly in their composition among cichlid species, even in the same ecomorph, due in part to their habitat-depth segregation. The algal species composition of the stomach contents and algal farms of each species differed, suggesting that cichlids selectively harvest their farms. The stomach contents were highly diverse, even between species in the same tribe, in the same feeding ecomorph.
KW - Adaptive radiation
KW - Herbivore
KW - Tanganyikan cichlid
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U2 - 10.1186/s12915-014-0090-4
DO - 10.1186/s12915-014-0090-4
M3 - Article
C2 - 25359595
AN - SCOPUS:84924332783
VL - 12
JO - BMC Medicine
JF - BMC Medicine
SN - 1741-7015
IS - 1
M1 - 90
ER -