sporadic infection of wolbachia in a recently established population of formica fusca零星的感染沃尔巴克氏体属在最近建立了人口胶木fusca.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Psyche Volume 2012, Article ID 432151, 6 pages doi:10.1155/2012/432151 Research Article Sporadic Infection of Wolbachia in a Recently Established Population of Formica fusca Krista K. Ingram, Andrew P. Hoadley, Matt Iandoli, John Kahler, Stacey Marion, Swetha Peteru, Emily Sabo, and Jee Won So Department of Biology, Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Krista K. Ingram, kingram@ Received 1 October 2011; Revised 7 December 2011; Accepted 12 December 2011 Academic Editor: Alain Lenoir Copyright © 2012 Krista K. Ingram 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. This study examines the distribution and invasion dynamics of Wolbachia in a recently established Formica fusca population. Pre- liminary data revealed the intermittent infection of Wolbachia across colonies, providing the opportunity to test for ecological factors affecting the acquisition and spread of the parasite. Only 35% of colonies are infected in this population. Both infected and noninfected nests have similar dispersion patterns that approximate a random distribution, suggesting that transmission of Wolbachia between adjacent colonies is not common. There is no difference in the infection rate between workers and brood, indi- cating that workers are not actively eliminating the infection. Our results show no significant association between Wolbachia infec- tion and nest size; however, infected colonies tend to be larger than noninfected colonies. Finally, Wolbachia infection was not asso- ciated with queen n