Rdependency of partners inside the obligate higherattine mutualism implies that organic
Rdependency of partners in the obligate higherattine mutualism implies that natural choice is partitioned at two levels choice acting on every on the individual partners and higherlevel choice acting around the combined mutualistic entities .Nevertheless, the fact that ant colonies and garden symbionts are most likely to commit for life (also right after occasional horizontal swaps) implies that the grouplevel element is much more important than the individual element, because monoculture rearing largely if not completely precludes the emergence of traits that cheat on the mutualistic services on the partner species .It as a result seems reasonable to assume that all colonies that we collected represented wellfunctioning entities of ant forageprovisioning and induced garden enzymeactivity, constant with ANOVAs showing that both antspecies and fungal species had important general effects on garden enzyme activity spectra.Nonetheless, the interaction terms recommended that fungal haplotype is definitely the most fundamental element simply because .Enzyme activity spectra were moreover impacted by the mixture of ant species and fungal species, and .Activity of certainenzymes varied greater than activity of others depending on fungal species, but not ant species (Figure).These findings are consistent with fungal plant degrading enzyme activities getting a direct influence on colony fitness [,,,] and with these activities getting plastically adjusted to the forage material utilised to manure fungus gardens PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21323541 .We are conscious that some enzyme activity might have been due to bacterial activities in fungus gardens , but their share within the fungus garden biomass is so minor that this cannot have impacted our key results (see to get a far more elaborate rationale of ignoring additional garden symbionts when interpreting all round enzyme activity spectra).The capacity for carbohydrate active enzyme production is hugely conserved among the basidiomycete fungi although these enzymes are usually not constitutively present and only developed when induced by appropriate substrate for degradation .Inside the attine ant mutualism this induction has been outsourced to the farming ants that offer the substrate, mix it with fecal enzymes and likely handle its addition for the actively increasing garden components in manners that imply rather precise enzyme activity induction .Given this advanced type of mutual dependence, it thus seems reasonable to assume that variations in enzyme activity SCH00013 Purity & Documentation amongst gardens maintained by ant colonies inside a smaller geographical area are either fungalhaplotypespecific or antspecific or both, as we report in our present study (Figure).Nevertheless, finding persistent efficiency variation across fungal cultivar species in 4 out of the six attine species that we studied seems to present a conundrum because evolutionary models of mutualism stability usually predict fixation on the most effective partner inside a population .Interaction specificities in our study populations of Sericomyrmex amabilis and Trachymyrmex sp. have been consistent with this expectation, but the 4 other Trachymyrmex species shared garden symbionts, were observed to associate with various of them and inferred statistically to maybe even associate inside a fairly random manner.This may possibly reflect evolutionary tradeoffs involving enzyme activity along with other key traits for instance desiccation tolerance, disease susceptibility or temperature sensitivity that formal models haven’t yet regarded as (but see ).The selection regimes imposed by such tradeof.