Not Extremely Plastic: Testing the Limits of Morphological Plasticity in Fungal Mycelia in Response to Soil Grazers

Abstract

Modular organisms such as fungi are assumed to exhibit extreme morphological plasticity, yet this assumption has rarely been tested experimentally. Their morphology emerges from local, independent responses of constituent modules, suggesting strong plastic responses to environmental conditions. While such levels of plasticity decouple morphology from ecological function, they make these organisms an ideal system for studying the evolution of plasticity. Here we quantified the plasticity of modular fungi to grazers with known strong effects on their fitness and tested two competing hypotheses: (1) fungal morphology converges on a common ‘grazing-resistant’ phenotype across species (i.e., extreme plasticity) or (2) grazer-induced plasticity remains limited and species-specific. We found support for the latter, suggesting a more nuanced plasticity for fungi than would be expected based on their modularity. Our study calls for refining assumptions about plasticity in modular organisms and informs the use of morphological traits as predictors of ecological function.