Abstract
Our study investigated the fungistatic effects of the anal secretions ofNicrophorus nepalensisHope on mouse carcasses. The diversity of fungi on carcasses was investigated in five different experimental conditions that corresponded to stages of the burial process. The inhibition of fungal growth on carcasses that were treated by mature beetles before burial was lost when identically treated carcasses were washed with distilled water. Compared with control carcasses, carcasses that were prepared, buried, and subsequently guarded by mature breeding pairs of beetles exhibited the greatest inhibition of fungal growth. No significant difference in fungistasis was observed between the 3.5 g and the 18 to 22 g guarded carcasses. We used the growth of the predominant species of fungi on the control carcasses,Trichodermasp., as a biological indicator to examine differences in the fungistatic efficiency of anal secretions between sexually mature and immature adults and between genders. The anal secretions of sexually mature beetles inhibited the growth ofTrichodermasp., whereas the secretions of immature beetles did not. The secretions of sexually mature females displayed significantly greater inhibition of the growth ofTrichodermasp. than those of sexually mature males, possibly reflecting a division of labor in burying beetle reproduction.
Highlights
Burying beetles (Nicrophorus spp.) use small vertebrate carcasses as food for their larval broods by depositing their eggs around a buried carcass [1, 2]
We investigated whether the fungistatic efficiency of beetles correlated with the sexual maturity or the sex of the parent, and we examined whether fungistatic capacity of beetles was sex or age dependent
The N. nepalensis Hope beetles were collected using 15 hanging pitfall traps that were baited with 40 g of chicken meat each and placed at 100 m intervals along the Fengkang Forest Road (22∘00N, 120∘41E) in Kaohsiung City in southern Taiwan at altitudes of 1100 to 1600 m above sea level from January to July, 2009
Summary
Burying beetles (Nicrophorus spp.) use small vertebrate carcasses as food for their larval broods by depositing their eggs around a buried carcass [1, 2]. Competition for carcasses is intense [6,7,8], and burying beetles of the same or different species may fight to maintain occupancy of the carcass [1, 9,10,11]. Burying beetles exhibit adaptive strategies that enable them to manage the carrion resources in such diverse conditions, such as adjusting the number of eggs laid [13, 14] and practicing infanticide [15, 16], with the number of surviving larvae positively correlated with carcass size [9, 10, 17]
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