The ultimate peanut butter on crackers for Hyalella: diatoms on macrophytes rather than bacteria and fungi on conditioned terrestrial leaf litter

It is well established that terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems are interlinked in a myriad of ways, yet understanding of the role terrestrial particulate organic matter (OM) plays in supporting aquatic macroinvertebrate production is still incomplete and debated. We investigated the role of terrestrial particulate OM (leaf litter) and autochthonous OM (macrophytes) with and without biofilm as food sources for the model benthic macroinvertebrate Hyalella (Amphipoda). We hypothesised that biofilm (algae, fungi, bacteria) associated with terrestrial and aquatic plants is the main food source for benthic primary consumers. First, we microbially conditioned the leaf litter insitu for 10‐weeks. Then, we performed a laboratory feeding experiment with nine treatments: no food, conditioned leaf litter from two native terrestrial plants, non‐conditioned leaf litter from these plants, two freshly collected macrophyte species with periphyton, and these macrophytes without periphyton. We measured the growth and analysed the fatty acid (FA) composition of field‐collected and experimental amphipods reared on these diets. We found that amphipods fed food sources without biofilm grew poorly and had a FA content and composition resembling that of starved animals. The same was observed for amphipods fed one leaf litter type with biofilm. However, animals fed the other leaf litter type with biofilm grew during the feeding experiment and showed a characteristic FA composition linked to the higher fungal biomass in this food source. We showed that amphipods fed macrophytes with biofilm resembled field‐collected animals regarding FA amounts and composition; monounsaturated FA representing >40% of total FA, with 16:1n‐7 (palmitoleic acid) and 18:1n‐9 (oleic acid) being the most abundant, and polyunsaturated FA representing 30% of total FA. The FA data indicated algae, particularly diatoms, as evidenced by large quantities of its biomarker 16:1n‐7, were the main food for the amphipods. We conclude diatoms were the peanut butter on crackers for the amphipods, and diatom consumption supported its somatic growth and polyunsaturated FA composition. In contrast, bacteria and fungi on conditioned leaf litter were lower quality food sources because they do not provide essential FA for macroinvertebrates growth and physiology. These results have important ecological implications from a food web perspective.