Entomology, Ornithology & Herpetology: Current Research
Open Access

Laboratory of Animal Ecology, Graduate School of Agriculture, Hokkaido University, Japan

Publications

• Research Article   
  Genetic Differentiation between Color Morphs of a Color-Polymorphic Aphid Macrosiphoniella yomogicola
  Author(s): Eisuke Hasegawa*, Yuuka Murakami, So Shiraiwa and Tatsumi Kudo
  
  Maintenance of intraspecific polymorphisms is important for biodiversity. The aphid Macrosiphoniella yomogicola has two color morphs (green and red) in Hokkaido. Their primary attending ants (Lasius japonicus) can manipulate the frequency of the green morph to match that of the red morph to maintain the polymorphism in an aphid colony. Ants prefer the green morph owing to its high-quality honeydew; however, the ants intentionally maintain nutritionally inferior red morphs in every colony because the ants only manipulate the reproductive rate of the green morph, i.e., the ants discriminate between the two morphs. Thus, the benefit of the red morphs to the ants should differ from nutrient exploitation. This hypothesis requires a genetic trade-off between the two morphs. Here based on three microsatellites, we show that the genetic distance between both morphs collected from the same sam.. View More»
  DOI: 10.35248/2161-0983.8.217

  Abstract HTML PDF