Journal article
Partner fidelity and environmental filtering preserve stage-specific turtle ant gut symbioses for over 40 million years
Ecological monographs, v 93(1), pn/a
01 Feb 2023
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
Sustaining beneficial gut symbioses presents a major challenge for animals, including holometabolous insects. Social insects may meet such challenges through partner fidelity, aided by behavioral symbiont transfer and transgenerational inheritance through colony founders. We address such potential through colony-wide explorations across 13 eusocial, holometabolous insect species in the ant genus Cephalotes. Through amplicon sequencing, we show that previously characterized worker microbiomes are conserved in soldier castes, that adult microbiomes exhibit trends of phylosymbiosis, and that Cephalotes cospeciate with their most abundant adult-enriched symbiont. We find, also, that winged queens harbor worker-like microbiomes prior to colony founding, suggesting vertical inheritance as a means of partner fidelity. Whereas some adult-abundant symbionts colonize larvae, larval gut microbiomes are uniquely characterized by environmental bacteria from the Enterobacteriales, Lactobacillales, and Actinobacteria. Distributions across Cephalotes larvae suggest more than 40 million years of conserved environmental filtering and, thus, a second sustaining mechanism behind an ancient, developmentally partitioned symbiosis.
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Details
- Title
- Partner fidelity and environmental filtering preserve stage-specific turtle ant gut symbioses for over 40 million years
- Creators
- Yi Hu - Drexel UniversityCatherine L. D'Amelio - Drexel UniversityBenoit Bechade - Drexel UniversityChristian S. Cabuslay - Drexel UniversityPiotr Lukasik - Drexel Univ, Dept Biol, Philadelphia, PA 19104 USAJon G. Sanders - Cornell UniversityShauna Price - Cornell UniversityEmily Fanwick - Drexel UniversityScott Powell - George Washington UniversityCorrie S. Moreau - Cornell UniversityJacob A. Russell - Drexel University
- Publication Details
- Ecological monographs, v 93(1), pn/a
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Number of pages
- 34
- Grant note
- 1050360; 1110515; 1442144; 1442256 / National Science Foundation; National Science Foundation (NSF) 32070401 / National Natural Science Foundation of China; National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Biology
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000907720400001
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85145690960
- Other Identifier
- 991020950524104721
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- International collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Ecology