Tropical parabiotic ants Highly unusual cuticular substances and low interspecific discrimination 英文参考文献.docVIP

Frontiers in Zoology BioMedCentral Research Open Access Tropical parabiotic ants: Highly unusual cuticular substances and low interspecific discrimination Florian Menzel1, Nico Blüthgen1 and Thomas Schmitt*2 Address: 1University of Würzburg, Biocenter, Department of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology, Am Hubland, 97074 Würzburg, Germany and 2University of Freiburg, Institute of Biology I (Zoology), Department of Evolutionary Biology and Animal Ecology, Hauptstr.1, 79104 Freiburg, Germany Email: Florian Menzel - menzel@biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de; Nico Blüthgen - bluethgen@biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de; Thomas Schmitt* - thomas.schmitt@biologie.uni-freiburg.de * Corresponding author Published: 20 October 2008 Received: 30 May 2008 Accepted: 20 October 2008 Frontiers in Zoology 2008, 5:16 doi:10.1186/1742-9994-5-16 This article is available from: /content/5/1/16 ? 2008 Menzel et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Associations between animal species require that at least one of the species recognizes its partner. Parabioses are associations of two ant species which co-inhabit the same nest. Ants usually possess an elaborate nestmate recognition system, which is based on cuticular hydrocarbons and allows them to distinguish nestmates from non-nestmates through quantitative or qualitative differences in the hydrocarbon composition. Hence, living in a parabiotic association probably necessitates changes of the nestmate recognition system in both species, since heterospecific ants have to be accepted as nestmates. Results: In the present study we report highly unusual cuticular profiles in the parabiotic species Crematogaster modiglianii and Camp