ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Partner abundance controls mutualism stability and the pace of morphological change over geologic time.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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14 citing papers in PubMed, 63 citations in OpenAlex.
- The stepwise rise of angiosperm-dominated terrestrial ecosystems.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Partner dependency alters patterns of coevolutionary selection in mutualisms.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Cavity and entrance pore development in ant plant hypocotyls.Frontiers in plant science · 2023Article
- Reciprocity and interaction effectiveness in generalised mutualisms among free-living species.Ecology letters · 2023Article
- Genome-wide transcriptome signatures of ant-farmedEcology and evolution · 2021Article
- Coevolutionary transitions from antagonism to mutualism explained by the Co-Opted Antagonist Hypothesis.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Whose trait is it anyways? Coevolution of joint phenotypes and genetic architecture in mutualisms.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Consistency in mutualism relies on local, rather than wider community biodiversity.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Phenotypic plasticity in size of ant-domatia.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Tradeoffs in the evolution of plant farming by ants.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Using Nutritional Geometry to Explore How Social Insects Navigate Nutritional Landscapes.Insects · 2020Review
- Climate and symbioses with ants modulate leaf/stem scaling in epiphytes.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Symbiont switching and alternative resource acquisition strategies drive mutualism breakdown.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Recent origin and rapid speciation of Neotropical orchids in the world's richest plant biodiversity hotspot.The New phytologist · 2017Article
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2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mutualisms that involve symbioses among specialized partners may be more stable than mutualisms among generalists, and theoretical models predict that in many mutualisms, partners exert reciprocal stabilizing selection on traits directly involved in the interaction. A corollary is that mutualism breakdown should increase morphological rates of evolution. We here use the largest ant-plant clade (Hydnophytinae), with different levels of specialization for mutualistic ant symbionts, to study the ecological context of mutualism breakdown and the response of a key symbiosis-related trait, domatium entrance hole size, which filters symbionts by size. Our analyses support three predictions from mutualism theory. First, all 12 losses apparently only occur from a generalist symbiotic state. Second, mutualism losses occurred where symbionts are scarce, in our system at high altitudes. Third, domatium entrance hole size barely changes in specialized symbiotic species, but evolves rapidly once symbiosis with ants has broken down, with a "morphorate map" revealing that hotspots of entrance hole evolution are clustered in high-altitude areas. Our study reveals that mutualistic strategy profoundly affects the pace of morphological change in traits involved in the interaction and suggests that shifts in partners' relative abundances may frequently drive reversions of generalist mutualisms to autonomy.
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