What is it about?
The bacteria is in the soil, it gets eaten by the scarab larva and later adult females culture the bacteria acccumulated in a special gland - and the male beetles are attracted to the smell of the bacteria - a mutualism over the sex pheromone. The smell is phenol, from cleaving tyrosine.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
This is a fascinating story first discovered in 1969, many other scarabs use phenolic compounds but this is the only bacterial mutualism case reported - and here we finally named the bacteria.
Perspectives
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Morganella morganii bacteria produces phenol as the sex pheromone of the New Zealand grass grub from tyrosine in the colleterial gland, The Science of Nature, June 2016, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s00114-016-1380-1.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page