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OOS-3:
Mutualists as parasites: How mutualistic are mutualists, and why?
Monday,
August 8, 8 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Rooms 511a and 511d, Level 5, Palais
des congrès de Montréal
Organizers:
Jeff Powell (jpowell@uoquelph.ca),
John Klironomos, Ben Wolfe
Description:
Mutualistic interactions should benefit all participants in this type of
symbiosis. However, interactions between “mutualists” commonly fall along a
mutualism-parasitism continuum. Genotypic and environmental alterations can lead
to asymmetrical exchange of benefits among the symbionts, resulting in one
symbiont exploiting another. Viewing mutualisms in this ecological context does
little to broaden our understanding of how these interactions function under
other circumstances. It also does little to tell us why these interactions
persist or how they evolve. In this session, researchers working on a variety of
different mutualisms provide a background of their particular model systems and
speculate on what it means to be a mutualist in that system, how the functioning
of the mutualism can vary in time and space, and why the mutualism persists.
Invited speakers use empirical and/or theoretical approaches in an attempt to
understand the ecological and evolutionary significance of mutualism in the
presence of non-mutualistic interactions.
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