Journal
BIOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 7, Issue 1, Pages 67-70Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2010.0521
Keywords
ant-fungal parasitism; tritrophic interaction; middle Eocene; Messel
Categories
Funding
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
- Marie Curie International Fellowship
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Parasites commonly manipulate host behaviour, and among the most dramatic examples are diverse fungi that cause insects to die attached to leaves. This death-grip behaviour functions to place insects in an ideal location for spore dispersal from a dead body following host death. Fossil leaves record many aspects of insect behaviour (feeding, galls, leaf mining) but to date there are no known examples of behavioural manipulation. Here, we document, to our knowledge, the first example of the stereotypical death grip from 48 Ma leaves of Messel, Germany, indicating the antiquity of this behaviour. As well as probably being the first example of behavioural manipulation in the fossil record, these data support a biogeographical parallelism between mid Eocene northern Europe and recent southeast Asia.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available