Genotype distribution of Raffaelea quercivora in the oak galleries and its composition in the mycangia of Platypus quercivorus

Raffaelea quercivora is the pathogenic fungus that causes Japanese oak wilt. The female monogynous ambrosia beetle, Platypus quercivorus, carries this fungus in mycangia on the pronotum. These beetles bore galleries in oak trees with their partners to produce offspring, and they deposit fungus on the gallery walls from their mycangia. The offspring mature in the gallery, before loading the fungal pathogen and flying from the gallery to other healthy trees. To investigate the unloading and loading modes of the fungus within the gallery, we developed four polymorphic microsatellite markers for R. quercivora and identified the fungal genotypes in the galleries and mycangia of the beetles. Small wood chips were sampled at 5–10‐mm intervals from the walls of five galleries in a dead Quercus serrata tree. The pronota were also sampled from five female adult beetles. The genotypes of the R. quercivora isolates from the wood chips and pronota were identified using the microsatellite makers. The genotypic analysis showed that each gallery was inhabited patchily by 5–10 genotypes of R. quercivora, and the mycangia of each beetle contained 3–6 genotypes. These results indicate that diverse R. quercivora genotypes are unloaded repeatedly from the mycangia of female beetles onto the gallery wall, which results in their patchy distribution on the walls. When the offspring leave the host tree, the fungal clones that proliferate in the walls are also loaded repeatedly into the mycangia of the mature beetles.