Neotyphodium endophytic fungi, the asexual state of Epichloë species, protect cool-season grasses against stresses. The outcomes of Neotyphodium-grass symbioses are agronomically relevant as they may affect the productivity of pastures. It has been suggested that the mutualism is characteristic of agronomic grasses and that differential rates of gene flow between both partners' populations are ...

Nursery pollinators, and the plants they use as hosts for offspring development, function as exemplary models of coevolutionary mutualism. The two pre-eminent examples--fig wasps and yucca moths--show little variation in the interaction: the primary pollinator is an obligate mutualist. By contrast, nursery pollination of certain Caryophyllaceae, including Silene spp., by two nocturnal moth gene...

Interspecific mutualisms are widespread, but how they evolve is not clear. The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is the main theoretical tool to study cooperation, but this model ignores ecological differences between partners and assumes that amounts exchanged cannot themselves evolve. A more realistic model incorporating these features shows that strategies that succeed with fixed exchanges (e. g.,...

One common class of ant-plant mutualism involves ants that defend from natural enemies in return for food and sometimes shelter. Studies of these interactions have played a major role in shaping our broad understanding of murualism. Their central contribution has come via their development of approaches to measuring the benefits, costs, and net outcomes of murualism, and their explicit consider...

CIntroduction ........................... ................................................. .............. ......... .. ... .. .......................... 185 Life on Eruth ... ........ ... ... ............... ............ .. .. .. ................................................................................ 186 Parasitism and Pathogenicity .... ..... .......... .................................

This article concerns the study of stochastic Gilpin-Ayala mutualism models with white noise and Poisson jumps. Firstly, an explicit solution for one-dimensional Gilpin-Ayala mutualism model with jumps is obtained and the asymptotic pathwise behavior is analyzed. Then, sufficient conditions for the existence of global positive solutions, stochastically ultimate boundedness and stochastic perman...

ants consume or store the honeydew which is secreted by aphids or other homopteran insects. major benefit of ant attendance for aphids is protection against natural enemies. a study was carried out during 2009-2010, to determine the mutualistic association between ants and aphids on different host plants in some parts of khuzestan and esfahan provinces. a total of 20 ant species belonging to 12...

The paradox of mutualism is typically framed as the persistence of interspecific cooperation, despite the potential advantages of cheating. Thus, mutualism research has tended to focus on stabilizing mechanisms that prevent the invasion of low-quality partners. These mechanisms alone cannot explain the persistence of variation for partner quality observed in nature, leaving a large gap in our u...

Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into mutualistic networks, and that nestedness reduces effective inter-species competition, thus facilitating mutually beneficial interactions and increasing the...