N the forest floor.Local microhabitat variations therefore seem to be
N the forest floor.Nearby microhabitat differences therefore seem to be unimportant for fungal cultivar specialization, although it was notable that T.cornetzi species and essentially shared all symbionts with T.zeteki, but that T.cornetzi species seemed to rear a distinct set of fungi extra closely connected to the leafcutting ant cultivar Leucoagaricus gongylophorus (Figure).Sample sizes had been also small to draw any firm conclusions on cultivar specificity among the 3 cryptic T.cornetzi species, since one evaluation showed that of your all round variance in cultivar identity among ant species rearing additional than a single cultivar occurred inside species and a subsequent contingency table analysis failed to reject the hypothesis that associations are random inside this group of 4 Trachymyrmex species.Despite the obligate dependency of all higherattine ants on specialized fungal cultivars, each parties may perhaps advantage from occasional “speciesrecombination” events to acquire improved partnerships.Such novel antfungus relationships could be generated by occasional horizontal transmission of fungal cultivars among ant nests .T.zeteki, the T.cornetzi species, and S.amabilis almost absolutely have overlapping foraging territories so that founding queens that have lost their very own cultivar may encounter burrows of con or allospecific other queens to steal gardens .This implies that the two instances of onetoone INK1197 R enantiomer supplier specialization in our data set (T.sp.and S.amabilis) are unlikely to be resulting from PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21323541 lack of chance in encountering alternative symbionts.Nonetheless, that leaves the query why their single lineages of symbionts did not diversify.Each ant species are typical inside the Panama canal zone , appear to have outbred panmictic mating systems, and there is no indication of populationDe Fine Licht and Boomsma BMC Evolutionary Biology , www.biomedcentral.comPage ofsubstructuring in among them (S.amabilis) that was barcoded at various Panamanian websites (J.Liberti et al.unpublished results).The cultivation of a single fungal symbiont by T.sp..and S.amabilis hence seems unlikely to be on account of current invasions accompanied by genetic bottlenecks, but largerscale barcoding research as discussed above will be needed to assess the degree to which these onetoone interactionspecificities are maintained across Panama.As far as interactionspecificity research happen to be accomplished in the decrease attine ants, additionally they identified the entire range of higher to no cultivar specialization Mycocepurus smithii is identified to cultivate at the least nine distinct symbionts in sympatry but Cyphomyrmex species cultivate 1 symbiont per ant species throughout an entire lineage .Nonetheless, in the latter study, spatial sampling scales have been much bigger and replicate sampling within web pages a lot less than our present single website approach.The reduced attine ants rear nonspecialized fungal symbionts that likely continue to exchange genes with freeliving relatives at some low frequency , which may well suggest that interaction specificity within the lower attine ants is as variable as within the greater attine ants, in spite of fundamental differences in symbiotic commitment amongst obligate and nonspecialized crop symbionts.This underlines that the extremely derived symbiont species L.gongylophorus that all Atta and Acromyrmex leafcutting ants rear might represent a unique kind of specificity that came about throughout a secondary selective sweep only some million years ago .Possible fitness consequences of cultivar genotype diversityThe inte.