[ad_1]
Growing inside a dead mouse could really be zero, but not for some beetles. The intestinal microbes of their parents keep the corpse fresh, creating a nursery where the larvae can thrive.
The burial of the parents of beetles with a small dead animal is remarkable, says co-author Shantanu Shukla of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. "It looks different. It feels different. It is completely transformed by beetles. "
Coleoptera Nicrophorus vespilloides Begin family life by burying a small dead vertebrate that keeps it fresh enough to feed its baby. The parents open a small cave in the corpse and the newborns slip into the throat. As young beetles grow inside, parents regularly refresh a dark microbial film inside the cavity. This useful goo is not the usual viscous substance that blooms in carcasses, but resembles the intestinal microbiome of the beetle, Shukla and his colleagues report on October 15 in the newspaper. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
The carcass that parents smear with oral and anal secretions develops a "special smell," but "it's certainly not as bad as a dead animal buried in the ground for several days," says Shukla. "You can hold it under your nose, and there is no foul odor."
Beetle parents and larvae produce antimicrobial substances, and biologists first asked if they prevented decay by simply suppressing microbial growth. However, in recent years, Shukla and others have favored secretions of Coleoptera that propagate desirable microbes: Coleoptera do not eliminate a microbial community. They are just restructuring it.
In laboratory experiments on these carcass nurseries, Shukla and her colleagues verified the benefits of the restructured microbial community. Some bark beetles have been fully exposed to the living film of microbes that parents tend to keep in the cavity. With others, Shukla sweeps the biofilm made by the parents daily as it is renewed. As the larvae reached the end of their throat phase, those grown in cleaned cavities had used their food less efficiently. Poor larvae took about one-third less weight per gram of carcass consumed than those who had the intolerance of their parents, the team said.
Shukla and her colleagues kept the beetles as natural as possible in the laboratory. The parents occupied the cavity and watched the young people. But this approach makes it difficult to separate the way that larvae and parents contribute to biofilms, says Daniel Rozen from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, who also studied the beetle burial microbiome. Young people also manipulate the cavity by adding their own secretions and biting bacteria – and almost everything else.
"What will remain, that's the tail of the mouse," says Shukla, "as well as the skull and some pieces of skin."
[ad_2]
Source link
