Assistant Professor University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida
Co-authors: Jeffrey Sosa-Calvo, Bob Johnson, and Bert Hölldobler Ant-loving crickets (Myrmecophilidae) are the only obligate parasites in the order Orthoptera. They are abundant inside the nests of ants where they solicit liquid food directly from the mouths of their hosts, consume host brood, scavenge stored food, or harvest waxes from host cuticles. Myrmecophilus manni is reportedly a host-generalist that exploits multiple ant partners across subfamilies. Putative M. manni vary tremendously in body-size depending on the identity of their hosts. One of the challenges of using traditional DNA barcoding methods to separate morphologically indistinguishable orthopterans is the abundance of non-functional mitochondrial pseudogenes (numts). We used two molecular approaches to determine if ant crickets associated with different hosts, at the same sites, were cryptic species or polyphenic host generalists.Using DNA from specimens across the USA and Mexico, we built single gene tree using the mitochondrial DNA barcoding gene Cytochrome c oxidase I (COI). With a subset of the same specimens, we also created a tree using a second approach, 3RAD (similar to ddRADseq), which allowed us to discover, and genotype hundreds of thousands of new Mymecophilus genetic markers (SNPs). Both methods uncovered the same major clades and numerous cryptic species of ant crickets. Surprisingly, crickets belonging to the same ‘species’ all exploited multiple ant hosts, and expressed a range of adult body sizes. In one case, a single site was home to two clades, each with large and small-bodied crickets, associated with 8 ant host species, from 3 subfamilies.
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