Forum für Wissenschaft, Industrie und Wirtschaft

Home Fachgebiete Biowissenschaften Chemie Nachricht

'Ballooning' spiders grounded by infection

nächste Meldung

Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology suggest that it may be in the bacteria's interests to ground the spiders and that this reduction in dispersal could reduce gene flow and impact on reproductive isolation within the meta-population.

While working at the University of East Anglia, Sara Goodacre led an international team of researchers who investigated the microbes' effect on the spiders' ballooning behavior. She said, "Because we found no reduction in fitness associated with Rickettsia infection, the reduced long-distance dispersal seems unlikely to be simply due to decreased body condition caused by illness. Rather, we believe that reducing long-distance dispersal could be an evolved adaptive modification by bacterial infections to promote their own transmission".

The researchers treated the spiders with antibiotics to reduce the bacterial infection and showed that this increased their ballooning frequency. They also observed that Rickettsia-infected spiders reared in the laboratory had reduced long-distance (but not short-distance) dispersal. This parasite-induced change in a non-reproductive trait has never been shown before and, according to Goodacre, "Clearly shows that the dynamics of ecosystem services such as a spider's pest-controlling function may be altered as a consequence of bacterial infection".

1. Microbial modification of host long-distance dispersal capacity
Sara L Goodacre, Oliver Y Martin, Dries Bonte, Linda Hutchings, Chris Woolley, Kamal Ibrahim, C.F. George Thomas and Godfrey M Hewitt
BMC Biology (in press)

2. Images of ballooning spiders are available here:

http://www.biomedcentral.com/graphics/email/images/spider1.jpg
http://www.biomedcentral.com/graphics/email/images/spider2.jpg

Please credit Goodacre et al., BMC Biology

3. BMC Biology - the flagship biology journal of the BMC series - publishes research and methodology articles of special importance and broad interest in any area of biology and biomedical sciences. BMC Biology (ISSN 1741-7007) is covered by PubMed, MEDLINE, BIOSIS, CAS, Scopus, EMBASE, Zoological Record, Thomson Reuters (ISI) and Google Scholar.

4. BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/) is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model. All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is part of Springer Science+Business Media, a leading global publisher in the STM sector.

Graeme Baldwin | Quelle: EurekAlert!
Weitere Informationen: www.biomedcentral.com

nächste Meldung