期刊
AMERICAN NATURALIST
卷 197, 期 1, 页码 138-145出版社
UNIV CHICAGO PRESS
DOI: 10.1086/711876
关键词
dispersal; vertical transmission; host development; phoresy; range expansion; superorganism
资金
- Texas Ecolab award
- Ari Yehiel Blattstein Endowed Presidential Scholarship
The study reveals a novel relationship between host dispersal and symbiont transmission in Texas leaf-cutter ant colonies, where hitchhiking cockroaches use female alates to transmit themselves from parent colonies to daughter colonies for higher-quality host infection. The research highlights the importance of colony development as a selection pressure on symbiont transmission.
Symbionts of ant colonies can hitchhike on winged ant reproductives (alates) during colony nuptial flights. Attaphila fungicola Wheeler, a miniature cockroach that lives in the nests of Texas leaf-cutter ants (Atta texana Buckley), hitchhikes on female alates (winged queens). Hitchhiking roaches are presumably vertically transmitted from leaf-cutter parent colonies to daughter colonies, remaining with female alates as they transition into foundresses (workerless queens); however, foundresses have limited resources and high mortality rates. Rather than remaining with foundresses likely to die (vertical transmission), roaches might abandon them during dispersal to infect higher-quality later stages of colony development (female alate-vectored transmission). In field experiments, I find evidence for female alate-vectored transmission and discover that roaches use a second hitchhiking step (riding foraged plant material) to infect established colonies. This work reveals a novel relationship between host dispersal and symbiont transmission and shows that colony development can be an important selection pressure on transmission.
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