title: Quality and quantity: transitions in antimicrobial gland use for parasite defense.
abstract: Parasites are a major force in evolution, and understanding how host life history affects parasite pressure and investment in disease resistance is a general problem in evolutionary biology. The threat of disease may be especially strong in social animals, and ants have evolved the unique metapleural gland (MG), which in many taxa produce antimicrobial compounds that have been argued to have been a key to their ecological success. However, the importance of the MG in the disease resistance of individual ants across ant taxa has not been examined directly. We investigate experimentally the importance of the MG for disease resistance in the fungus-growing ants, a group in which there is interspecific variation in MG size and which has distinct transitions in life history. We find that more derived taxa rely more on the MG for disease resistance than more basal taxa and that there are a series of evolutionary transitions in the quality, quantity, and usage of the MG secretions, which correlate with transitions in life history. These shifts show how even small clades can exhibit substantial transitions in disease resistance investment, demonstrating that host-parasite relationships can be very dynamic and that targeted experimental, as well as large-scale, comparative studies can be valuable for identifying evolutionary transitions.
authors.affiliation: School of Life Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QG UK.
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-1722-672X
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Tranter
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Investigaciones Científicas y Servicios de Alta Tecnología Edificio 219, Panamá 5 Ciudad del Saber Clayton Panama City PO Box 0843-01105 Republic of Panama.
authors.forename: Hermógenes
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Fernández-Marín
authors.affiliation: School of Life Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QG UK.
authors.forename: William O H
authors.initials: WO
authors.lastname: Hughes
keywords: Attini; disease resistance; fungus‐growing ant; host–parasite evolution; leaf‐cutting ant; metapleural gland
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