Multiple choice: hemiparasite performance in multi-species mixtures

Hemiparasitic plants have green leaves, but extract water and solutes from neighbouring plants. It is still poorly understood how different host plants in communities contribute to parasite performance, as species that are good hosts in single-host experiments may not necessarily be preferred hosts in mixtures. We grew the root hemiparasite Rhinanthus alectorolophus (Orobanchaceae) together with each of 13 host species (experiment 1) and with 15 different four-species mixtures of these hosts (exp. 2) that differed in the number of legumes and of host functional groups. Parasites profited from mixtures including more legumes and from mixtures including different host functional groups. Some host species and mixtures were very tolerant of parasitism and supported large parasites without being strongly suppressed in their own growth, but the suppression of a species in the single-host experiment did not explain the suppression of a species in a host mixture. We thus calculated for each hos...