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Amazon

Ants
by Adrienne Sussman

The Rainforest’s
Micro-Engineers
Copyright BBC Natural History Unit

^ Another angle
of a M. schumanni
worker ant attack-
ing a foreign tree
by injecting formic
acid into a leaf.
I magine walking through the Amazon rainforest. Trees surround you, blocking out the sky,
plants and insects swarm on every surface, and unseen animals rustle through the canopy
above. Suddenly, you step into a clearing. The area is bare except for the evenly spaced
trunks of a single species of tree, Duroia hirsuta. No other vegetation is in sight, and there are
few signs of animal life. Above the stunted branches, you can see the sky.

As you walk into one of these “devil’s gardens”, you might search on the construction of devil’s gardens reveals ants’
feel you have entered a supernatural place. Local legends at- importance in the ecology of the rainforest.
tribute the groves to an evil forest spirit. Ecologists, in search
of a natural explanation, hypothesized that the phenomenon Into the Devil’s Garden
was related to the tropical ant Myrmelachista schumanni. Frederickson began her study of devil’s gardens four
Recent work by Megan Frederickson, a graduate student in years ago at the Madre Selva Biological Station in western
the lab of Stanford Biology Professor Deborah Gordon, has Peru. She found striking patches of forest, some consisting
finally demonstrated that ants are indeed the cause. Her re- of more than 500 D. hirsuta trees. Noting the swarms of ants
in the groves, Frederickson formulated an initial hypothesis:
the ants somehow kill all plants other than D. hirsuta. To test
her conjecture, she planted two Spanish cedar saplings in ten
V The Amazon Rainforest
devil’s gardens she had picked as study sites. One of these
saplings was treated with a sticky insect barrier to protect
it from ants. She also planted two saplings outside of each
devil’s garden as a control group. Again, one of these trees
was protected from insects, while the other was not. The re-
www.gsfc.nasa.gov/goddardnews/20020712/lba.html

sults of the experiment were unmistakable: the sapling with-


out protection from ants and inside the devil’s garden turned
brown and died within days, while the treated sapling and
both control trees survived.
How did the ants kill the sapling? Frederickson observed
that the ants swarmed up the untreated cedar’s trunk, grasped
the leaves with their mandibles, and injected a substance into
the leaf. The leaves subsequently turned brown and fell off,
and the body of the tree soon died as well. She suspected that
the substance was formic acid—other species of ants in M.

24 Stanford Scientific
Photographed by Megan Frederickson

^ A M. schumanni worker ant injecting formic acid into a foreign tree. ^ A Devil’s Garden, a mysterious clearing amidst the lush rainforest.

schumanni’s family use formic acid for hunting or protection. A chemical Interestingly, the experiment indicated that the presence of domatia
analysis of the ants’ poison glands confirmed this hypothesis. Another test had no effect on the ants’ behavior: at all sites, both of the foreign trees
verified the lethal effects of formic acid, which spreads through the plant’s were killed while both of the D. hirsuta were spared. These results suggest
circulatory system and poisons it. that the ants use chemical markers or some other means to identify which
Next, Frederickson addressed the question of how the ants distin- trees to attack and which trees to cultivate.
guished foreign plants from D. hirsuta. As the ants nest inside the stalks
of D. hirsuta, How Much Control Do Ants Have Over the
she predicted Devil’s Garden?
The ant colonies are ‘as that they might M. schumanni’s attempts at engineering its environment are remark-
old as many of the oldest make their de-
cision based on
ably successful. During the study, Frederickson measured the growth rate
of 26 different devil’s gardens and used this factor to estimate each colo-
trees in the rainforest.’ the presence of
these hollow
ny’s age. The findings were impressive: one of the colonies seems to be
over 800 years old. According to Frederickson, this suggests that the ant
stems, called domatia. Frederickson’s next experiment was to create arti- colonies are “as old as many of the oldest trees in the rainforest.” “The
ficial domatia in a foreign tree species by placing foil-wrapped test tubes system,” she says, “is remarkably stable.” The findings indicate that ants
partially filled with cotton inside the stem. If the ants were looking for have an astonishing degree of control over their environment. Interest-
good nesting sites, these artificial domatia would be attractive. For this ingly, ants are actually one of the most dominant animals in the tropi-
experiment, she planted two foreign saplings at each test site: one un- cal rainforest, making up an estimated 10 percent of the total rainforest
treated, and one with artificial domatia. She also planted two D. hirsuta at biomass. Vertebrate species, meanwhile, make up only 3 percent of the
each site: again, one sapling for control and one sapling with an artificially total. Ecologically, ants are a sustainable force in shaping the structure of
implanted nesting space. rainforests.

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Amazon Ants

The age of the devil’s gardens also indicates a social system unusual
for ants; such a large and durable colony must have multiple queens at any
one time, each of whom is replaced as she dies. Since only one other spe-
cies of ant in the world is known to have such long-lasting colonies, the
longevity of devil’s gardens is an attractive subject for future research.
Frederickson also wants to research the extent of the ants’ control over

http://www.ucrl.ars.usda.gov/cec/photo/formica2.htm
a devil’s garden: specifically, how large the gardens can grow. While the
largest devil’s garden in Frederickson’s study was more than 1300 square
meters, there are rumors of gardens as large as football fields within the
forest. Such an enormous ant colony might provide an interesting case
study for population biologists interested in probing the limits of the col-
ony’s expansion. Frederickson anticipates that factors such as disease,
parasitism, and aggression with other ant species may eventually stop
colony growth, or that after a certain point, the ants may simply allocate
more resources towards reproduction than towards development.

Further Uncovering the Role of Rainforest Ants ^ The red wood ant drags a sawfly larva back to its nest; it has
Frederickson’s results have received attention in the scientific com- killed the larva using formic acid.
munity not only because she solved the mystery of the devil’s gardens,
but also because she found the first
example of ants using formic acid
to farm plants on such a large scale.
Like many tropical organisms, D. hir-
suta and M. schumanni seem to have
carved out a very specific ecological
relationship that is mutually benefi-
cial. “This case is really amazing be-

http://www.wcrl.ars.usda.gov/cec/photo/d13.htm
cause the ant indirectly helps the plant
by killing off the competition,” ex-
plains Prof. Gordon. Yet the mutual-
ism is not as straightforward as it first
appears. Many other rainforest plants
would make good nests for the ants.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that M.
^ A common brown ant mag- schumanni ants in southern Peru and
nified x150 using a scanning Ecuador may have different host pref-
electron microscope
erences, and create devil’s gardens of
^ Again, red wood ants attacks two Cetonia cuprea beetles,
different types of trees. If this is true, then the ants’ adaptive preference for using formic acid.
a single tree species warrants closer research.
Fredrickson’s next study may resolve this mystery—and others. She
plans to investigate how ants chemically recognize D. hirsuta, how they
kill foreign plants in their gardens, and whether there are limits to the
size of the plants they can exterminate. Meanwhile, other members of
her research team are analyzing insect diversity in devil’s gardens to test
whether the insect population of the gardens differs from that of the rest of
the rainforest. If there are significant differences, the group may conduct
further experiments to determine whether the ants are attacking invading
http://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/4501/townants.htm

insects as well as foreign plants.


Either way, relationships such as the one between M. schumanni and
D. hirsuta provide a good opportunity to study the evolution of symbiotic
relationships in nature. As Frederickson put it, “we do need to understand
how they work if we want to understand all kinds of things about tropical
rainforests: why they are so biodiverse, their role in all kinds of things like
carbon storage and other global ecosystem processes, and if we want to
make a case for people not to cut them down.” S

Adrienne Sussman is a junior majoring in Biological Sciences with


a minor in Spanish Language. She is interested in neurobiology, ^ A town ant bites a human, in the same manner as M.
coffee, and travel. schumanni attack tree leaves.

26 Stanford Scientific

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