2. Behavioral Biology TALKS - Deutsche Zoologische Gesellschaft

�38 Marko Rohlfs A 702 / 15:15
Insect-fungus interactions driven by sex and toxins
Authors: Marko Rohlfs 1 , Silvia Caballero Ortiz 1 , Subhankar Chatterjee 1 , Katharina
Döll 1 , Petr Karlovsky 1 , Stefan Scheu 1
Affiliation: 1 J.F. Blumenbach Institute of Zoology and Anthropology, Georg August
University Göttingen, Germany
Inducible defense strategies are well established for plants attacked by herbivorous
insects. In contrast, fungi, despite their tremendous importance in the decomposer
food web, have largely been neglected. Direct fungivore resistance is mediated by
chemical properties of fungal tissue, e.g. production of toxic secondary metabolites
(mycotoxins). However, whether fungi control the synthesis of toxic metabolites in
response to insect fungivory and thereby affect insect behavior and fitness is
unknown. We demonstrate that insect fungivory on Aspergillus nidulans induces a
chemical phenotype that repels future fungivores and retards fungivore growth. We
found a significant up-regulation of various SMs and key genes involved in SM
synthesis in insect-challenged fungi, which coincided with the formation of sexual
fruiting bodies that were better protected against fungivory than asexual structures.
Our study thus demonstrates adaptive plasticity in the ability of fungi to resist
fungivory, which can be expected to affect multitrophic interactions in fungivore
communities.
Monday, September 24, 2012
Invited speaker 2: Chair – Ingo Hahn A 702 / 11:00
Stefan Lötters (Trier)
Ecological niches in Amazonian amphibians: linking macroecology to evolution
Author: Stefan Lötters 1
Affiliation: 1 Biogeography Department, Trier University
Macroecology addresses the abundance, distribution and diversity of organisms at
large spatial scales. In recent years, the ecological niche has received considerable
attention in macroecological research by increased efforts in developing models of
niche dimensions and, derived from that, species distributions models. Many of the
studies focus on the development and performance of techniques. I am interested in
the ecology and evolution of tropical biota, in particular Amazonian amphibians. In
this presentation, I give examples how we apply niche and species distribution
modeling to study (i) the Pleistocene biogeography of species which perform
Müllerian mimicry, (ii) the spatial ecology and history of allopatric congeneric species,
(iii) the Disturbance Vicariance hypothesis.
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