Abstract
Crop diseases caused by soil-borne fungal pathogens are threatening worldwide biodiversity and food security, but the unavoidable chemical inputs used thus far for fungal pathogen control have led to environmental issues and the emergence of chemical resistance in pathogens. Here we show that native soil mesofauna can be used as a natural weapon against soil-borne fungal diseases. We found that the widespread soil mesofauna fungivores, represented by mites, naturally provide agricultural soils with resistance to fungal pathogens through fungal grazing. Furthermore, we found that such a preexisting resistance in soils can be artificially enhanced by modifying the belowground habitat of mites and thus exploited for the control of various soil-borne fungal diseases of crops. Our findings demonstrate that incorporating native mesofauna into the ‘environment dimension’ within the soil-borne ‘disease triangle’ and mesofauna grazing into ‘soil suppressiveness’ leads to a better understanding of the pathogenesis of soil-borne fungal diseases and opens a new direction for their control.