会自己种真菌的甲虫

No one likes a moldy peach, so some farmers stop fungus from growing by dipping their produce in alcohol.

没人喜欢长了霉的桃子，因此有的农民会通过把收成浸泡在酒里来防止真菌生长。

But that trick doesn’t work on ambrosia fungus, which fungus-eating beetles raise in “gardens” that have a ready supply of ethanol.

不过这项魔法并不适用于蛀道真菌，有一种喜欢吃真菌的甲虫会在“花园”里通过稳定供应的酒精来养殖它们。

A new study suggests the alcohol not only helps the fungus grow, but it also inhibits microbial “weeds” that would otherwise crowd it out.

一项新的研究表明酒精不仅可以帮助真菌生长，还可以抑制“杂草”菌的生长，不然杂菌就会占据优势。

Ambrosia beetles survive by boring into trees and growing fungi inside.

殖菌蠹虫的生存就是靠从小在树里面生长，然后在里面种植真菌。

They prefer stressed or dying trees, which have more ethanol—an alcohol that’s produced naturally by the plant—flowing through their tissues.

它们更喜欢生病的或者垂死的树木，里面有更多的乙醇—是由植物自然生成的酒精—在内部组织里流淌。

To find out why, researchers took a closer to look at the black stem borer (pictured), an ambrosia beetle native to Asia that has become a tree-boring pest in North America.

为了找出原因，研究者们仔细查看了这种黑色树干里出生的虫子（上图），这种殖菌蠹虫原产于亚洲，现在变成了北美的树生害虫。

The researchers collected fungus from black stem borers in an Ohio woodland.

研究者们从俄亥俄州林地里的黑色树干中的殖菌蠹虫那里收集到了真菌。

Then they grew the fungus, a species called Ambrosiella grosmanniae, on laboratory plates that contained food with different concentrations of ethanol.

然后他们种植了这种真菌，这是一种叫做Ambrosiella grosmanniae的品种，他们种在实验室的含有不同浓度乙醇的食物的平板上。

They found that the fungus grew best when there was some ethanol—about 1% or 2%—but did worse when there were higher or lower concentrations, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

他们发现真菌在某个乙醇浓度时生长最好—大约1%到2%—不过超过或者低于这个浓度的时候都长得美那么好，这只研究团队今天在《美国科学院论文集》上发表了结果。

What’s more, even small amounts of ethanol stalled the growth of microbial “weeds” that crowd out the beetles’ food source, like the bacterium Penicillium.

另外，即便是少量的乙醇以可以阻碍其他的微生物“杂草”生长成为优势菌种，比如青霉素。

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