Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto, 25 Willcocks Street, Toronto M5S 3B2, Ontario, Canada.
Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Onna, Okinawa 904-0495, Japan.
Proc Biol Sci. 2023 Sep 13;290(2006):20231083. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2023.1083.
Mutualism improves organismal fitness, but strong dependence on another species can also limit a species' ability to thrive in a new range if its partner is absent. We assembled a large, global dataset on mutualistic traits and species ranges to investigate how multiple plant-animal and plant-microbe mutualisms affect the spread of legumes and ants to novel ranges. We found that generalized mutualisms increase the likelihood that a species establishes and thrives beyond its native range, whereas specialized mutualisms either do not affect or reduce non-native spread. This pattern held in both legumes and ants, indicating that specificity between mutualistic partners is a key determinant of ecological success in a new habitat. Our global analysis shows that mutualism plays an important, if often overlooked, role in plant and insect invasions.
互利共生可以提高生物个体的适应度，但如果其共生伙伴缺失，强烈的相互依赖也会限制物种在新的分布区域内的生存能力。我们收集了大量关于互利共生特征和物种分布范围的全球数据，以研究多种植物-动物和植物-微生物互利共生关系如何影响豆科植物和蚂蚁向新的分布区域扩散。我们发现，广义互利共生关系增加了物种在其原生分布范围以外建立和繁荣的可能性，而专门的互利共生关系要么没有影响，要么减少了非本地扩散。这一模式在豆科植物和蚂蚁中都成立，这表明互利共生伙伴之间的特异性是新栖息地生态成功的关键决定因素。我们的全球分析表明，互利共生在植物和昆虫入侵中起着重要的作用，尽管这种作用常常被忽视。
