The native submerged plant, Hydrilla verticillata outperforms its exotic confamilial with exposure to polyamide microplastic pollution: Implication for wetland revegetation and potential driving mechanism

•Effects of polyamide microplastic pollution on two submerged plants were investigated.•The native Hydrilla verticillata showed stable performance to all pollution levels.•The exotic Elodea nuttallii suffered when exposed to the severest pollution level.•The native is prior for wetland restoration under polyamide microplastic pollution.•The selective accumulation of mycorrhiza correlated with the plant performance. Microplastic pollution and biological invasion, as two by-products of human civilization, interfere the ecological function of aquatic ecosystem. The restoration of aquatic vegetation has been considered a practical approach to offset the deterioration of aquatic ecosystem. However, a lack of knowledge still lies in the species selection in the revegetation when confronting the interference from microplastic pollution and exotic counterpart. The present study subjected the native submerged species, Hydrilla verticillata and its exotic confamilial, Elodea nuttallii to the current and future scenarios of polyamide microplastic pollution. The plant performance proxies including biomass and ramet number were measured. We found that the native H. verticillata maintained its performance while the exotic E. nuttallii showed decreases in biomass and ramet number under severest pollution conditions. The restoration of native submerged plant such as H. verticillata appeared to be more effective in stabilizing aquatic vegetation in the scenario of accelerating microplastic pollution. In order to explore the underlying driving mechanism of performance differentiation, stress tolerance indicators for plants, sediment enzymatic activity and sediment fungal microbiome were investigated. We found that polyamide microplastic had weak effects on stress tolerance indicators for plants, sediment enzymatic activity and sediment fungal diversity, reflecting the decoupling between these indicators and plant performance. However, the relative abundance of sediment arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi for H. verticillata significantly increased while E. nuttallii gathered “useless” ectomycorrhizal fungi at the presence of severest polyamide microplastic pollution. We speculate that the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi assisted the stabilization of plant performance for H. verticillata with exposure to the severest polyamide microplastic pollution.