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"mutualism"
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Symbiosis : how different animals relate
\"This fascinating book, illustrated with colorful photographs, makes the topic of symbiosis easy and fun. It looks at the positive, negative, and neutral effects that result when different kinds of animals interact with each other. Symbiotic relationships highlighted include birds and fish that clean parasites off other animals, bacteria that help keep animals and people healthy, mosquitoes that pass diseases such as malaria, predators that hunt prey, and scavengers that help clean the earth. Other examples of symbiotic relationships include several kinds of animals. Students are asked to illustrate symbiosis in human relationships that are similar to those found in nature.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Correction: A Unique Resource Mutualism between the Giant Bornean Pitcher Plant, Nepenthes rajah, and Members of a Small Mammal Community
Figure 1 has been removed and was replaced with a lower resolution image.
Citation: Greenwood M, Clarke C, Lee CC, Gunsalam A, Clarke RH (2012) Correction: A Unique Resource Mutualism between the Giant Bornean Pitcher Plant, Nepenthes rajah, and Members of a Small Mammal Community.
Journal Article
Selling the future : community, hope, and crisis in the early history of Japanese life insurance
\"Examines the early history of the Japanese life insurance industry, from 1881 to 1945. The book focuses on how industry and government figures used concepts of mutuality in insurance marketing, health promotion campaigns, colonial governance, labor policy, and wartime mobilization\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Mutualisms in a warming world
In nature, plant species simultaneously interact with many different mutualistic partners. These mutualists may influence one another through direct interference or indirectly by competing for shared reward resources or through alteration of plant traits. Together, these mutualists also may combine to affect plant hosts in ways that may not be predictable based on pairwise interactions. Given that the outcome of mutualistic interactions often depends on environmental conditions, multi-mutualist effects on one another, and their plant hosts may be affected by global changes. Here, we grew focal plants under simulated global warming conditions and manipulated the presence of partner mutualists to test how warming affects the outcome of interactions between focal plants and their partners (nitrogen-fixing rhizobia, ant defenders, and pollinators) and interactions among these partner mutualists. We find that warming alters the fitness benefits plants receive from rhizobium resource mutualists but not ant mutualists and that warming altered plant investment in all mutualists. We also find that mutualist partners interact, often by altering the availability of plant-produced rewards that facilitate interactions with other partners. Our work illustrates that global changes may affect some but not all mutualisms, often asymmetrically (e.g., affecting investment in the mutualist partner but not plant host benefits) and also highlights the ubiquity of interactions between the multiple mutualists associating with a shared host.
Journal Article
Economy of scale
While foundation species can stabilize ecosystems at landscape scales, their ability to persist is often underlain by keystone interactions occurring at smaller scales. Acacia drepanolobium is a foundation tree, comprising >95% of woody cover in East African black-cotton savanna ecosystems. Its dominance is underlain by a keystone mutualistic interaction with several symbiotic ant species in which it provides housing (swollen thorns) and carbohydrate-rich nectar from extra-floral nectaries (EFN). In return, it gains protection from catastrophic damage from mega-herbivores. Crematogaster mimosae is the ecologically dominant symbiotic ant in this system, also providing the highest protection services. In addition to tending EFN, C. mimosae tend scale insects for carbohydrate-rich honeydew. We investigated the role of scale insects in this specialized ant-plant interaction. Specifically, does this putatively redundant third partner strengthen the ant-plant mutualism by making the ant a better protector of the tree? Or does it weaken the mutualism by being costly to the tree while providing no additional benefit to the ant-plant mutualism? We coupled observational surveys with two scale-manipulation experiments and found evidence that this third partner strengthens the ant-plant mutualism. Trees with scale insects experimentally removed experienced a 2.5X increase in elephant damage compared to trees with scale insects present over 10 months. Reduced protection was driven by scale removal causing a decrease in ant colony size and per capita baseline activity and defensive behavior. We also found that ants increased scale-tending and the density of scale insects on trees when EFN were experimentally reduced. Thus, in this system, scale insects and EFN are likely complementary, rather than redundant, resources with scale insects benefitting ants when EFN production is low (such as during annual dry periods in this semi-arid ecosystem). This study reveals that a third-partner strengthens an ant-plant mutualism that serves to stabilize a whole ecosystem.
Journal Article
Beyond nutrients: a meta-analysis of the diverse effects of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi on plants and soils
Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) can increase plant fitness under certain environmental conditions. Among the mechanisms that may drive this mutualism, the most studied is provisioning of nutrients by AMF in exchange for carbon from plant hosts. However, AMF may also provide a suite of non-nutritional benefits to plants including improved water uptake, disease resistance, plant chemical defense, soil aggregation, and allelochemical transport and protection. Here, we use a meta-analysis of 93 studies to assess the relative effect of AMF on nutritional and non-nutritional factors that may influence plant fitness. We find that the positive effects of AMF on soil aggregation, water flow and disease resistance are equal to the effect of AMF on plant nitrogen and phosphorus uptake. However, AMF had no effect on the uptake of other nutrients, plant water content, allelopathic transport or production of chemical defense compounds. We suggest future research directions, including experimentally assessing the relative contribution on plant fitness of AMF interactions by untangling the independence of alternative benefits of AMF from an increase in nutrient uptake. This will lead to a more holistic view of the mycorrhizal-plant association and a more accurate picture of the net impact on the plant or plant community in question.
Journal Article
Managing Friends and Foes: Sanctioning Mutualists in Mixed‐Infection Nodules Trades off With Defense Against Antagonists
Successful plant growth requires plants to minimize harm from antagonists and maximize benefit from mutualists. However, these outcomes may be difficult to achieve simultaneously, since plant defenses activated in response to antagonists can compromise mutualism function, and plant resources allocated to defense may trade off with resources allocated to managing mutualists. Here, we investigate how antagonist attack affects plant ability to manage mutualists with sanctions, in which a plant rewards cooperative mutualists and/or punishes uncooperative mutualists. We studied interactions among wild and domesticated pea plants, pea aphids, an aphid‐vectored virus (Pea Enation Mosaic Virus, PEMV), and mutualistic rhizobial bacteria that fix nitrogen in root nodules. Using isogenic rhizobial strains that differ in their ability to fix nitrogen and express contrasting fluorescent proteins, we found that peas demonstrated sanctions in both singly‐infected nodules and mixed‐infection nodules containing both strains. However, the plant's ability to manage mutualists in mixed‐infection nodules traded off with its ability to defend against antagonists: when plants were attacked by aphids, they stopped sanctioning within mixed‐infection nodules, and plants that exerted stricter sanctions within nodules during aphid attack accumulated higher levels of the aphid‐vectored virus, PEMV. Our findings suggest that plants engaged in defense against antagonists suffer a reduced ability to select for the most beneficial symbionts in mixed‐infection tissues. Mixed‐infection tissues may be relatively common in this mutualism, and reduced plant sanctions in these tissues could provide a refuge for uncooperative mutualists and compromise the benefit that plants obtain from mutualistic symbionts during antagonist attack. Understanding the conflicting selective pressures plants face in complex biotic environments will be crucial for breeding crop varieties that can maximize benefits from mutualists even when they encounter antagonists.
Journal Article
Soil biotic and abiotic effects on seedling growth exhibit context-dependent interactions
• The success of invasive plants is influenced by many interacting factors, but evaluating multiple possible mechanisms of invasion success and elucidating the relative importance of abiotic and biotic drivers is challenging, and therefore rarely achieved.
• We used live, sterile or inoculated soil from different soil origins (native range and introduced range plantation; and invaded plots spanning three different countries) in a fully factorial design to simultaneously examine the influence of soil origin and soil abiotic and biotic factors on the growth of invasive Pinus contorta.
• Our results displayed significant context dependency in that certain soil abiotic conditions in the introduced ranges (soil nitrogen, phosphorus or carbon content) influenced responses to inoculation treatments.
• Our findings do not support the enemy release hypothesis or the enhanced mutualism hypothesis, as biota from native and plantation ranges promoted growth similarly. Instead, our results support the missed mutualism hypothesis, as biota from invasive ranges were the least beneficial for seedling growth. Our study provides a novel perspective on how variation in soil abiotic factors can influence plant–soil feedbacks for an invasive tree across broad biogeographical contexts.
Journal Article