To picture this farm, imagine some dark blobs dangling high up in a tree.
Each blob can reach “about soccer ball size,” says evolutionary biologist Guillaume Chomicki of Durham University in England. From this bulbous base, a Squamellaria plant eventually sprouts leafy shoots and hangs, slumping sideways or upside down, from its host tree’s branches. In Fiji, one of the local names for the plant translates as “testicle of the trees.”
Some Squamellaria species grow in clusters and teem with fiercely protective ants. As a young seedling blob plumps up, jelly bean–shaped bubbles form inside, reachable only through ant-sized doorways. As soon as a young plant cracks open its first door to daylight, “ant workers start to enter and defecate inside the seedling to fertilize it,” Chomicki says.
The idea that ants tend these plants as farmers gave Chomicki one of those surprise-left-turn moments in science. In a string of papers published since 2016, he and colleagues share evidence for the idea that the Philidris nagasau ants may be the first known animals other than humans to farm plants. (The other known insect farmers cultivate fungi.)
By Susan Milius
April 23, 2020 at 6:00 am
"Chomicki’s latest paper, in the Feb. 4 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reports that ants planting seeds of their blobby crop make trade-offs, going for full sun and maximizing the rewarding, sweet flowers rather than planting in the shade, where plants would have higher nitrogen."
Traduction :
"Le dernier article de Chomicki, publié dans les Actes de l'Académie nationale des sciences du 4 février, rapporte que les fourmis qui plantent les graines de leur récolte font des compromis, en allant en plein soleil et en maximisant les fleurs gratifiantes et sucrées plutôt que de planter à l'ombre, où les plantes auraient plus d'azote."
- Tradeoffs in the evolution of plant farming by ants | PNAS, 04.02.2020 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/5/2535.short
[Image] The dark lump above, a Squamellaria plant, is not part of the tree it hangs from. It’s a member of the coffee family, cultivated on sunny branches as part of lumpy plantations created by Philidris nagasau ants.G. Chomicki
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