The ant, fungal cultivar, and Escovopsis system is one of mutualism and parasitism. Attine ants grow fungal cultivars that they feed and in turn use for food. Escovopsis is a parasitic fungus that uses the cultivated fungus as a host. However, studies have shown that Escovopsis is often but not always host specific. This leads to our research question: How will Escovopsis growth vary among pairings with natural hosts, non-natural hosts, and negative controls? By presenting various fungal cultivars to different Escovopsis samples, we were able to investigate this question. We found that Escovopsis was not restricted to the fungal cultivar hosts that coevolved in colonies of the same ant species. This led to a conclusion that coevolution does not necessarily cause strict host specificity in Escovopsis.
