Document Type

Pre-Print

Publication Date

2018

Subjects

Host-parasite relationships

Abstract

Environmental variation can have profound and direct effects on fitness, fecundity, and host symbiont interactions. Replication rates of microbes within arthropod hosts, for example, are correlated with incubation temperature but less is known about the influence of host-symbiont dynamics on environmental preference. Hence, we conducted thermal preference (Tp) assays and tested if infection status and genetic variation in endosymbiont bacterium Wolbachia affected temperature choice of Drosophila melanogaster. We demonstrate that isogenic flies infected with Wolbachia preferred lower temperatures compared to uninfected Drosophila. Moreover, Tp varied with respect to three investigated Wolbachia variants (wMel, wMelCS and wMelPop). While uninfected individuals preferred 24.4°C, we found significant shifts of - 1.2°C in wMel- and -4°C in flies infected either with wMelCS or wMelPop. We, therefore, postulate that Wolbachia-associated Tp variation within a host species might represent a behavioral accommodation to host-symbiont interactions and trigger behavioral self medication and bacterial titer regulation by the host.

Rights

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Locate the Document

http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/353292

DOI

10.1101/353292

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/30175

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