Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, 10691, Stockholm, Sweden,
Oecologia. 2013 Nov;173(3):779-90. doi: 10.1007/s00442-013-2659-y. Epub 2013 May 21.
In mutualistic interactions, partners obtain a net benefit, but there may also be costs associated with the provision of benefits for a partner. The question of whether aphids suffer such costs when attended by ants has been raised in previous work. Transgenerational effects, where offspring phenotypes are adjusted based on maternal influences, could be important in the mutualistic interaction between aphids and ants, in particular because aphids have telescoping generations where two offspring generations can be present in a mature aphid. We investigated the immediate and transgenerational influence of ant tending on aphid life history and reproduction by observing the interaction between the facultative myrmecophile Aphis fabae and the ant Lasius niger over 13 aphid generations in the laboratory. We found that the effect of ant tending changes dynamically over successive aphid generations after the start of tending. Initially, total aphid colony weight, aphid adult weight and aphid embryo size decreased compared with untended aphids, consistent with a cost of ant association, but these differences disappeared within four generations of interaction. We conclude that transgenerational effects are important in the aphid-ant interactions and that the costs for aphids of being tended by ants can vary over generations.
在互利共生关系中，伙伴双方都能获得净收益，但提供给合作伙伴的利益也可能伴随着成本。以前的研究中曾提出过这样一个问题：当蚜虫被蚂蚁照顾时，它们是否会付出这些代价。代际效应是指后代的表型根据母体的影响进行调整，这种效应在蚜虫和蚂蚁的互利共生关系中可能非常重要，特别是因为蚜虫具有伸缩世代的特点，即在一个成熟的蚜虫体内可以同时存在两代后代。我们通过观察专性拟寄生蚂蚁（Lasius niger）与豆蚜（Aphis fabae）之间的相互作用，在实验室中对 13 个蚜虫世代进行了 13 个世代的实验，研究了蚂蚁照顾对蚜虫生活史和繁殖的即时和代际影响。我们发现，在蚂蚁照顾开始后的连续几代蚜虫中，蚂蚁照顾的影响会动态变化。最初，与未受照顾的蚜虫相比，蚜虫总群重、蚜虫成虫重和蚜虫胚胎大小均有所下降，这与蚂蚁共生的代价一致，但这些差异在四代相互作用后消失了。我们的结论是，代际效应在蚜虫与蚂蚁的相互作用中非常重要，而且被蚂蚁照顾的蚜虫的代价可能会随着世代的变化而变化。
