Person: Baker, Chris
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Baker
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Chris
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Baker, Chris
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Publication Bacterial Diversity across Individual Lichens(American Society for Microbiology, 2011) Mushegian, Alexandra Arcadievna; Peterson, Celeste; Baker, Chris; Pringle, Anne E.Symbioses are unique habitats for bacteria. We surveyed the spatial diversity of bacterial communities across multiple individuals of closely related lichens using terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) and pyrosequencing. Centers of lichens house richer, more consistent assemblages than species-poor and compositionally disparate lichen edges, suggesting that ecological succession plays a role in structuring these communities.Publication Complexity in Mutualisms: Indirect Interactions With Multiple Parties(2015-09-23) Baker, Chris; Pierce, Naomi E.; Haig, David; Pfister, Donald H.Ant-plants provide ants with rewards such as housing and food in exchange for protection from herbivores. These protection mutualisms are complex webs of both direct interactions, such as ants feeding on host plant extrafloral nectar, and indirect interactions mediated by 'third party' species, such as ants consuming exudates from hemipterans feeding on the host plant. While some indirect interactions are well understood, in many cases our understanding is hindered by an incomplete picture of the relevant third-party species. In this dissertation, I explore third-party interactions of three obligately phytoecious ant species on the African ant-plant Vachellia drepanolobium (formerly Acacia drepanolobium) - Crematogaster mimosae, C. nigriceps and Tetraponera penzigi. First, I examine relationships between ants and fungi. I show behavioral differences towards fungi among the three ant species, and then use multiplexed amplicon sequencing to characterize their associated fungal communities. Each ant species harbors its own distinctive fungal community, and these communities are similar for each species even at two field sites separated by 200 kilometers. The ants may vector fungi when they colonize new host trees. T. penzigi most likely uses fungi as a food source, and fungi may also have nutritional or other growth implications for the host plant. Second, I investigate relationships between ants and 'myrmecophiles' - i.e. 'ant loving' arthropods that live alongside ants in the domatia. I show that myrmecophile communities differ among the three ant species, but are also highly context dependent, differing strongly between locations and sampling periods. Surprisingly, several species of myrmecophilous Lepidoptera are herbivorous, but are more commonly associated with the 'better' ant mutualists, C. mimosae, whose workers defend more effectively against browsing mammalian herbivores. My results show that plant ants shape both fungal communities and myrmecophile communities in domatia of their V. drepanolobium host plants. These third-party species may be viewed as 'extended phenotypes' of the ants, and are essential elements whose effects need to be incorporated into our understanding of the ant-plant protection mutualism.Publication Kin Selection and the Evolution of Social Information Use in Animal Conflict(Public Library of Science, 2012) Baker, Chris; Dall, Sasha R. X.; Rankin, Daniel J.Animals often use social information about conspecifics in making decisions about cooperation and conflict. While the importance of kin selection in the evolution of intraspecific cooperation and conflict is widely acknowledged, few studies have examined how relatedness influences the evolution of social information use. Here we specifically examine how relatedness affects the evolution of a stylised form of social information use known as eavesdropping. Eavesdropping involves individuals escalating conflicts with rivals observed to have lost their last encounter and avoiding fights with those seen to have won. We use a game theoretical model to examine how relatedness affects the evolution of eavesdropping, both when strategies are discrete and when they are continuous or mixed. We show that relatedness influences the evolution of eavesdropping, such that information use peaks at intermediate relatedness. Our study highlights the importance of considering kin selection when exploring the evolution of complex forms of information use.