Abstract
AbstractAphids of the genusTuberculatusMordvilko feed on Fagaceae trees and exhibit various interactions with ants, ranging from non-attendance to intermediate or close associations. Despite possession of fully developed wings, two ant-attended species,Tuberculatus quercicola(Matsumura) andTuberculatussp. A, exhibited extremely low dispersal. I examined the correlation between wing loading (ratio of body volume to wing area) and ant associations in 20 species ofTuberculatus. Based on a 1317 bp sequence in two mitochondrial regions, cytochrome oxidase I (COI) and NADH dehydrogenase subunit 1 (ND1), phylogenetic trees were reconstructed by neighbor-joining (NJ), most parsimony (MP), maximum likelihood (ML), and Bayesian analyses. All phylogenetic trees showed that mutualistic interactions with ants have evolved inTuberculatusat least five times. Comparative analyses based on the NJ, MP, and ML trees showed that increase in wing loading is correlated with ant associations, suggesting that ant-attended aphids have allocated more resources to their bodies than to their wings, resulting in lowered dispersal.
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