{"id":200325,"date":"2023-06-21T07:15:22","date_gmt":"2023-06-21T11:15:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=200325"},"modified":"2023-06-20T13:36:52","modified_gmt":"2023-06-20T17:36:52","slug":"researchers-sniff-out-how-ants-weed-their-fungus-gardens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2023\/06\/researchers-sniff-out-how-ants-weed-their-fungus-gardens\/","title":{"rendered":"Researchers Sniff Out How Ants Weed their Fungus Gardens"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Weed early and often&#8221; is the key to a productive garden. Interestingly, certain species of ants are also avid gardeners, a practice they\u2019ve refined over 50 million years. They too weed their underground fungus gardens, but how they know what to weed out has been a mystery. Now, a multidisciplinary team of scientists <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pnas.org\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2219373120\">report in PNAS on June 15 how ants distinguish<\/a> the good fungus from the bad.<\/p>\n<p>People rely on sight to identify weeds, but ants grow fungus underground in the dark and must have other ways to sense undesirable garden denizens. A team led by enviromental microbiologist Jonathan Klassen at the University of Connecticut and natural products chemist Marcy Balunas at the University of Michigan has found that the ants sniff out diseased fungus by detecting chemicals called peptaibols.<\/p>\n<p>The team focused on the ant species <i>Trachymyrmex septentrionalis,<\/i> whose habitat follows the pine-barren ecosystem from Long Island all the way south to East Texas.\u00a0<i>Trachymyrmex<\/i> ants grow their fungus below ground and feed it fresh organic detritus. The fungus acts almost like an external gut for the ant colony; the fungus grows up and around the fresh food laid on top of it in honeycomb shapes, produces digested food for the ants as it grows, and then secretes waste.<\/p>\n<p>Klassen Lab graduate student Katie Kyle, a co-first author on the paper, experimentally infected ant nests with <i>Trichoderma<\/i>, a naturally occurring, disease-causing fungus that infects the ants\u2019 gardens and found that the ants began working overtime to remove the infection from the nests, increasing their waste output.<\/p>\n<p>Over the winter, while the ants were dormant, the team analyzed the fungal biomes of several different ant nests collected from different locations and found <i>Trichoderma<\/i> in all of them.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ruLVTj2q5jM\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Co-first author Sara Puckett, a recent graduate from the Balunas\u2019 UConn lab, prepared extracts of <i>Trichoderma<\/i>\u00a0containing the organic compounds of the fungus to determine if the weeding was triggered by one or more of these compounds or simply by the presence of the pathogen\u2019s cells.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe were curious to see if the ants were weeding because of compounds produced by the infecting fungus,\u201d Balunas said.<\/p>\n<p>The team found the <i>Trichoderma<\/i> extract, when applied to the fungus garden, sent the ants into frenzied weeding activity just as actual <i>Trichoderma<\/i> infections had.<\/p>\n<p>Working with scientists from University of California, San Diego and University of North Carolina, Greensboro, they discovered the nests contained peptaibols, a family of compounds known to be produced by <i>Trichoderma<\/i>. However, finding which specific peptaibols were causing ant weeding proved more challenging since these extracts contained many compounds.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_200360\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-200360\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-200360 size-medium img-responsive lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/DSCN1457-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Klassen Lab graduate student Katie Kyle experimenting with an ant nest\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/DSCN1457-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/DSCN1457-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/DSCN1457-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/DSCN1457-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/DSCN1457-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/DSCN1457-560x420.jpg 560w, https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/DSCN1457-887x665.jpg 887w\" data-sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 300px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 300\/225;\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-200360\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Klassen Lab graduate student Katie Kyle experimentally infected ant nests with Trichoderma and found that the ants began working overtime to remove the infection from the nests, increasing their waste output.(Contributed photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The researchers tested pure peptaibols, including two new compounds called trichokindins VIII and IX.<\/p>\n<p>It turns out that all the peptaibols tested caused some level of ant weeding, a finding that implies it may not be one particular peptaibol but rather that the whole suite of peptaibols can induce the ants to weed their garden.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis suite of <i>Trichoderma<\/i> compounds inducing ant behavior is in contrast to many other natural products whose activity can often be attributed to one compound,\u201d Balunas says.<\/p>\n<p>Although \u00a0their data support peptaibols as a signal to weed, it\u2019s not clear what exactly the ants are perceiving. It may be that the invading <i>Trichoderma<\/i> fungus produces the peptaibols and the ants detect them and then weed, note the researchers. Or perhaps the ants are detecting a secondary response from the fungus garden itself.<\/p>\n<p>The next step is to figure out those details of ant-fungus communication, Klassen says.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMaybe the fungus is signaling \u2018I\u2019m sick.&#8217; Maybe the fungus is detecting the peptaibols. We need to flesh out the chain of signaling,\u201d Klassen says.<\/p>\n<p>The findings highlight one of the few known systems where an animal responds to a disease of its beneficial symbiotic partner instead of a disease of its own body, a phenomenon that Balunas and Klassen are calling an extended defense response, and one that they look forward to continuing to tease apart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chemicals called peptaibols help ants keep diseased fungus out of their habitat<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":200367,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2076,2235],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1899],"class_list":["post-200325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-research","category-today-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-11 03:58:55","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200325"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":200418,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200325\/revisions\/200418"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/200367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200325"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=200325"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=200325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}