Natures wonders: birds follow ants to food (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, July 25, 2023, 17:23 (277 days ago) @ David Turell

In the tropics:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/birds-driver-ants-africa-ecology

"COIMBATORE, India — To better understand Equatorial Guinea’s tropical birds, ornithologists Luke L. Powell and Patricia Rodrigues scan the ground rather than the trees. They are searching for nests of driver ants (Dorylus spp.). These voracious predators will march out of their underground nests and fan out into a meters-wide swarm, flushing out insects and worms from undergrowth. From the trees, birds swoop down to catch the fleeing insects. And where the ant swarms go, the birds follow.

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"Since 2020, Rodrigues has spent weeks at a time scrutinizing the ground for ants in a forest near Ciudad de la Paz. When she finds them, she knows to keep her distance. “They’re super-duper aggressive and they have giant mandibles that can pierce your skin,” Rodrigues says. Despite her caution, ant bites “inevitably happen”— sometimes the ants fall out of trees onto her and her colleagues.

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"For their latest study, Rodrigues, Powell and colleagues placed cameras at the entrances of seven driver ant nests and recorded about 80 hours of footage. “Birds come up to a nest entrance and check it out,” says Powell, leaning his body forward and turning his head left and right, imitating a bird, “and fly into the direction of where the ants are raiding that day.”

"When the team played calls of ant-following birds like the white-tailed ant thrush (Neocossyphus poensis) and fire-crested alethe (Alethe castanea), it attracted about 30 other bird species. Many of these birds eat insects and could be homing in on the calls of specialized ant-following birds for food, the researchers say. In contrast, only seven bird species responded to calls of the African green pigeon (Treron calvus), which does not follow ants.

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"These newly documented behaviors in African tropical birds show they are more specialized on driver ants than researchers had expected, Rodrigues says. The team now wants to examine how this specialization affects the birds when forest degradation changes the numbers and distribution of driver ants."

Comment: we know birds are smart.