Are we underestimating the diversity and incidence of insect bacterial symbionts? A case study in ladybird beetles

Vertically transmitted bacterial symbionts are common in arthropods. However, estimates of their incidence and diversity are based on studies that test for a single bacterial genus and often only include small samples of each host species. Focussing on ladybird beetles, we collected large samples from 21 species and tested them for four different bacterial symbionts. Over half the species were infected, and there were often multiple symbionts in the same population. In most cases, more females than males were infected, suggesting that the symbionts may be sex ratio distorters. Many of these infections would have been missed in previous studies as they only infect a small proportion of the population. Furthermore, 11 out of the 17 symbionts discovered by us were either in the genus Rickettsia or Spiroplasma, which are rarely sampled. Our results suggest that the true incidence and diversity of bacterial symbionts in insects may be far greater than previously thought.

• Publication year

  2007

• Venue

  Biology Letters

• Publication date

  2007-09-18

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1098/rsbl.2007.0373PMID 17878145PMCID 2111056
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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