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Costs of being a diet generalist for the protist predator Dictyostelium discoideum

P. Shreenidhi,D. A. Brock,Rachel I. McCabe,J. Strassmann,D. Queller

Published 2024 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

ABSTRACT

Significance Perhaps the most fundamental conflict in nature occurs when one organism consumes another. Diet generalists benefit from the advantage of eating many prey but then must deal with many prey defenses. We explore costs associated with a broad diet in a protist microbial predator, Dictyostelium discoideum. These predators of bacteria show a delay in growth when switched from one bacterium to another, supporting the hypothesis that they must deploy different strategies. They also experience costs when grown on many bacteria at once, suggesting that the alternative strategies for consuming different prey are partly incompatible with each other. Our findings shed light on the nature of diet generalism and highlight the complexity of predation in the microbial world.

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