Balance of nature: ants fertilize trees they live on (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, August 31, 2017, 19:17 (2640 days ago) @ David Turell

A new study demonstrates this:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170830202144.htm

"You have often seen ants wandering about on leaves -- even in tall trees. In fact, it is the plants themselves that attract them by secreting sugar-containing nectar, which the ants eat with great pleasure. And on their journey around trunks and leaves, the ants snap insects that could otherwise damage the plants.

"This has been known for many years and Danish researchers now use this knowledge in the battle against harmful insects in organic apple orchards. They simply move wood ants from the forest and create new anthills in the orchards.

"Now researchers have found yet another positive effect of the ants' visit to the trees. Their urine or faeces, excreted together, contain amino acids and urea -- substances that are commercially used to spray on leaves to fertilise the plants.

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"First, the researchers observed that the visited trees had a higher content of nitrogen than the trees to which the ants did not have access. The trees visited by the ants also had larger crowns than the trees without ants.

"On the 'visit trees' some of the leaves were wrapped so that the ants could not leave their waste here. But also in these leaves, the researchers were able to trace the labeled nitrogen.

"'For the first time, we have shown that nutrients from ant waste are taken up by the leaves and transported to other places in the tree," says senior scientist Joachim Offenberg, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, who was in charge of the studies.

"'This has great ecological importance. The ants, which primarily feed on insects in the trees, digest the insects and hand the nutrients on a silver platter to the plants. You can almost say that the plants receive the nutrition intravenously exactly where they need it," explains Joachim Offenberg.

"The ants appear frequently on new shoots and on fruits -- both areas of the plant that can benefit from an additional nutrient input.

The nutritional supplement to the leaves can be a great advantage for many different plants, and the researchers will now investigate how widespread the phenomenon is.

"'We know that globally there are lots of plants inhabited by ants. The nutritional supplement for their leaves can have a major ecological significance and may also have been decisive for the evolution of ant-plant interactions," says Joachim Offenberg."

Comment: The balance of nature can be seen in many different ways.