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Ant queens increase their reproductive efforts after pathogen infection
Infections with potentially lethal pathogens may negatively affect an individual's lifespan and decrease its reproductive value. The terminal investment hypothesis predicts that individuals faced with a reduced survival should invest more into reproduction instead of maintenance and growth. Sev...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Royal Society Publishing
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5541571/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28791176 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.170547 |
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author | Giehr, Julia Grasse, Anna V. Cremer, Sylvia Heinze, Jürgen Schrempf, Alexandra |
author_facet | Giehr, Julia Grasse, Anna V. Cremer, Sylvia Heinze, Jürgen Schrempf, Alexandra |
author_sort | Giehr, Julia |
collection | PubMed |
description | Infections with potentially lethal pathogens may negatively affect an individual's lifespan and decrease its reproductive value. The terminal investment hypothesis predicts that individuals faced with a reduced survival should invest more into reproduction instead of maintenance and growth. Several studies suggest that individuals are indeed able to estimate their body condition and to increase their reproductive effort with approaching death, while other studies gave ambiguous results. We investigate whether queens of a perennial social insect (ant) are able to boost their reproduction following infection with an obligate killing pathogen. Social insect queens are special with regard to reproduction and aging, as they outlive conspecific non-reproductive workers. Moreover, in the ant Cardiocondyla obscurior, fecundity increases with queen age. However, it remained unclear whether this reflects negative reproductive senescence or terminal investment in response to approaching death. Here, we test whether queens of C. obscurior react to infection with the entomopathogenic fungus Metarhizium brunneum by an increased egg-laying rate. We show that a fungal infection triggers a reinforced investment in reproduction in queens. This adjustment of the reproductive rate by ant queens is consistent with predictions of the terminal investment hypothesis and is reported for the first time in a social insect. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5541571 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | The Royal Society Publishing |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-55415712017-08-08 Ant queens increase their reproductive efforts after pathogen infection Giehr, Julia Grasse, Anna V. Cremer, Sylvia Heinze, Jürgen Schrempf, Alexandra R Soc Open Sci Biology (Whole Organism) Infections with potentially lethal pathogens may negatively affect an individual's lifespan and decrease its reproductive value. The terminal investment hypothesis predicts that individuals faced with a reduced survival should invest more into reproduction instead of maintenance and growth. Several studies suggest that individuals are indeed able to estimate their body condition and to increase their reproductive effort with approaching death, while other studies gave ambiguous results. We investigate whether queens of a perennial social insect (ant) are able to boost their reproduction following infection with an obligate killing pathogen. Social insect queens are special with regard to reproduction and aging, as they outlive conspecific non-reproductive workers. Moreover, in the ant Cardiocondyla obscurior, fecundity increases with queen age. However, it remained unclear whether this reflects negative reproductive senescence or terminal investment in response to approaching death. Here, we test whether queens of C. obscurior react to infection with the entomopathogenic fungus Metarhizium brunneum by an increased egg-laying rate. We show that a fungal infection triggers a reinforced investment in reproduction in queens. This adjustment of the reproductive rate by ant queens is consistent with predictions of the terminal investment hypothesis and is reported for the first time in a social insect. The Royal Society Publishing 2017-07-05 /pmc/articles/PMC5541571/ /pubmed/28791176 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.170547 Text en © 2017 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Biology (Whole Organism) Giehr, Julia Grasse, Anna V. Cremer, Sylvia Heinze, Jürgen Schrempf, Alexandra Ant queens increase their reproductive efforts after pathogen infection |
title | Ant queens increase their reproductive efforts after pathogen infection |
title_full | Ant queens increase their reproductive efforts after pathogen infection |
title_fullStr | Ant queens increase their reproductive efforts after pathogen infection |
title_full_unstemmed | Ant queens increase their reproductive efforts after pathogen infection |
title_short | Ant queens increase their reproductive efforts after pathogen infection |
title_sort | ant queens increase their reproductive efforts after pathogen infection |
topic | Biology (Whole Organism) |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5541571/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28791176 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.170547 |
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