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.
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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
This work raises questions about the bacterial ecology we have not investigated,
Professor David Maxwell Suckling
University of Auckland
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.
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