Quality and quantity: transitions in antimicrobial gland use for parasite defense.

ABSTRACT: Parasites are a major force in evolution, and understanding how host life history affects parasite pressure and investment in disease resistance is a general problem in evolutionary biology. The threat of disease may be especially strong in social animals, and ants have evolved the unique metapleural gland (MG), which in many taxa produce antimicrobial compounds that have been argued to have been a key to their ecological success. However, the importance of the MG in the disease resistance of individual ants across ant taxa has not been examined directly. We investigate experimentally the importance of the MG for disease resistance in the fungus-growing ants, a group in which there is interspecific variation in MG size and which has distinct transitions in life history. We find that more d

SUBMITTER: Tranter C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4717345 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature