Climate-mediated cooperation promotes niche expansion in burying beetles
- Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
- Columbia University, United States
- National University of Tainan, Taiwan
- National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Abstract
The ability to form cooperative societies may explain why humans and social insects have come to dominate the earth. Here we examine the ecological consequences of cooperation by quantifying the fitness of cooperative (large groups) and non-cooperative (small groups) phenotypes in burying beetles (Nicrophorus nepalensis) along an elevational and temperature gradient. We experimentally created large and small groups along the gradient and manipulated interspecific competition with flies by heating carcasses. We show that cooperative groups performed as thermal generalists with similarly high breeding success at all temperatures and elevations, whereas non-cooperative groups performed as thermal specialists with higher breeding success only at intermediate temperatures and elevations. Studying the ecological consequences of cooperation may not only help us to understand why so many species of social insects have conquered the earth, but also to determine how climate change will affect the success of these and other social species, including our own.
Article and author information
Author details
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All of the animals were handled according to approved Biosafety Committee protocols of the Academia Sinica. The protocol was approved by the Biosafety Committee of Academia Sinica (Permit Number:BSF0412-00002446).
Copyright
© 2014, Sun et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 3,609
- views
-
- 264
- downloads
-
- 43
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Climate-mediated cooperation promotes niche expansion in burying beetles
eLife 3:e02440.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.02440
Further reading
-
- Ecology
- Evolutionary Biology
Understanding the origins of novel, complex phenotypes is a major goal in evolutionary biology. Poison frogs of the family Dendrobatidae have evolved the novel ability to acquire alkaloids from their diet for chemical defense at least three times. However, taxon sampling for alkaloids has been biased towards colorful species, without similar attention paid to inconspicuous ones that are often assumed to be undefended. As a result, our understanding of how chemical defense evolved in this group is incomplete. Here, we provide new data showing that, in contrast to previous studies, species from each undefended poison frog clade have measurable yet low amounts of alkaloids. We confirm that undefended dendrobatids regularly consume mites and ants, which are known sources of alkaloids. Thus, our data suggest that diet is insufficient to explain the defended phenotype. Our data support the existence of a phenotypic intermediate between toxin consumption and sequestration — passive accumulation — that differs from sequestration in that it involves no derived forms of transport and storage mechanisms yet results in low levels of toxin accumulation. We discuss the concept of passive accumulation and its potential role in the origin of chemical defenses in poison frogs and other toxin-sequestering organisms. In light of ideas from pharmacokinetics, we incorporate new and old data from poison frogs into an evolutionary model that could help explain the origins of acquired chemical defenses in animals and provide insight into the molecular processes that govern the fate of ingested toxins.
-
- Ecology
Tracking wild pigs with GPS devices reveals how their social interactions could influence the spread of disease, offering new strategies for protecting agriculture, wildlife, and human health.
