specialized fungal parasites and opportunistic fungi in gardens of attine ants专门的真菌寄生虫和机会性真菌attine蚂蚁的花园.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Psyche Volume 2012, Article ID 905109, 9 pages doi:10.1155/2012/905109 Review Article Specialized Fungal Parasites and Opportunistic Fungi in Gardens of Attine Ants Fernando C. Pagnocca,1 Virginia E. Masiulionis,1 and Andre Rodrigues1, 2 1 Centre for the Study of Social Insects, Sao Paulo State University (UNESP), 13506-900 Rio Claro, SP, Brazil ˜ 2 Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Sao Paulo State University (UNESP), 13506-900 Rio Claro, SP, Brazil ˜ Correspondence should be addressed to Andre Rodrigues, andrer@rc.unesp.br Received 1 September 2011; Revised 2 November 2011; Accepted 5 November 2011 Academic Editor: Volker Witte Copyright © 2012 Fernando C. Pagnocca et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Ants in the tribe Attini (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) comprise about 230 described species that share the same characteristic: all coevolved in an ancient mutualism with basidiomycetous fungi cultivated for food. In this paper we focused on fungi other than the mutualistic cultivar and their roles in the attine ant symbiosis. Specialized fungal parasites in the genus Escovopsis negatively impact the fungus gardens. Many fungal parasites may have small impacts on the ants’ fungal colony when the colony is balanced, but then may opportunistically shift to having large impacts if the ants’ colony becomes unbalanced. 1. Introduction family Pterulaceae (the “coral fungi” [ 10, 11]), (iii) a group of