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Persistence of an extracellular systemic infection across metamorphosis in a holometabolous insect.

ABSTRACT: Organisms with complex life cycles can differ markedly in their biology across developmental life stages. Consequently, distinct life stages can represent drastically different environments for parasites. This difference is especially striking with holometabolous insects, which have dramatically different larval and adult life stages, bridged by a complete metamorphosis. There is no a priori guarantee that a parasite infecting the larval stage would be able to persist into the adult stage. In fact, to our knowledge, transstadial transmission of extracellular pathogens has never been documented in a host that undergoes complete metamorphosis. We tested the hypothesis that a bacterial parasite originally sampled from an adult host could infect a larva, then survive through metamorphosis and persist into the adult stage. As a model, we infected the host Drosophila melanogaster with a horizontally transmitted, extracellular bacterial pathogen, Providencia rettgeri We found that this natural pathogen survived systemic infection of larvae (L3) and successfully persisted into the adult host. We then discuss how it may be adaptive for bacteria to transverse life stages and even minimize virulence at the larval stage in order to benefit from adult dispersal.

SUBMITTER: Duneau DF

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5830671 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Persistence of an extracellular systemic infection across metamorphosis in a holometabolous insect.

Duneau David F DF Lazzaro Brian P BP

Biology letters 20180201 2

Organisms with complex life cycles can differ markedly in their biology across developmental life stages. Consequently, distinct life stages can represent drastically different environments for parasites. This difference is especially striking with holometabolous insects, which have dramatically different larval and adult life stages, bridged by a complete metamorphosis. There is no <i>a priori</i> guarantee that a parasite infecting the larval stage would be able to persist into the adult stage ...[more]

PMID: 29438055

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Project description:It is a long-standing challenge to understand how changes in food resources impact consumer life history traits and, in turn, impact how organisms interact with their environment. To characterize food quality effects on life history, most studies follow organisms throughout their life cycle and quantify major life events, such as age at maturity or fecundity. From these studies, we know that food quality generally impacts body size, juvenile development, and life span. Importantly, throughout juvenile development, many organisms develop through several stages of growth that can have different interactions with their environment. For example, some parasitoids typically attack larger instars, whereas larval insect predators typically attack smaller instars. Interestingly, most studies lump all juvenile stages together, which ignores these ecological changes over juvenile development.We combine a cross-sectional experimental approach with a stage-structured population model to estimate instar-specific vital rates in the bean weevil, Callosobruchus maculatus across a food quality gradient. We characterize food quality effects on the bean weevil's life history traits throughout its juvenile ontogeny to test how food quality impacts instar-specific vital rates.Vital rates differed across food quality treatments within each instar; however, their effect differed with instar. Weevils consuming low-quality food spent 38%, 37%, and 18% more time, and were 34%, 53%, and 63% smaller than weevils consuming high-quality food in the second, third, and fourth instars, respectively. Overall, our results show that consuming poor food quality means slower growth, but that food quality effects on vital rates, growth and development are not equal across instars. Differences in life history traits over juvenile ontogeny in response to food quality may impact how organisms interact with their environment, including how susceptible they are to predation, parasitism, and their competitive ability.

Dataset Information

Persistence of an extracellular systemic infection across metamorphosis in a holometabolous insect.

Publications

Persistence of an extracellular systemic infection across metamorphosis in a holometabolous insect.

Similar Datasets

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