Have you ever found yourself in the future, wondering what heck happened? Seattle is swathed in tropical forest and there you are trying to remember the good old days when banana slugs were less than a meter long. Don’t you wish that you written some of the stuff from the good old days down? Well now is your opportunity to prepare for the future with this diary as your guide. The daily bucket is a virtual space to place your observations of the natural world. The world is changing and this is a way to keep track. Flowers blooming? Ants on the march? Found an interesting rock? Tell us about it in the comments. Please include as much information about the time and place as you feel comfortable providing.
Remember- Bucket Now for the future!
In the tropics (on land) if you stop for a minute and look around, chances are that the first movement you see will be an ant. Ants are everywhere, on the ground, under objects, inside rotten logs, on the leaves and stems of understory plants, and even way up in the canopy.
A lot of ants have mutualistic relationships with plants. Some are pollinators but many actually tend for their host plant, providing protection in exchange for food. A mutualism is an ecological interaction between two species such that both species do better in the presence of the other than they would on their own. Mutualisms are incredibly important; most terrestrial ecosystems benefit from the interactions of plants and fungi associated with their roots, coral reefs depend on the interaction of the coral animals and algae that live inside of them.
One of the most spectacular ant/plant mutualism, a text book classic, is the interaction between the bull-horn acacia and the acacia ant. Ironically, due to taxonomic changes, the bullthorn acacia is no longer in the genus Acacia, but is now called Vachellia cornigera. The acacia ant is Pseudomyrmex ferruginea.
During my recent trip to Panama I saw a large number of bull-honrn acacias on Isla Boca Brava. While the plants were somewhat patchy in distribution they occurred in a range of habitats: along streams, next to roads, and well inside the forest. The plants get their names from their paired, swollen thorns which supposedly resemble the horns of a steer.
The thorns are actually hollow and the ants live inside of them. Through two different structures, beltian bodies which provide protein and extra-floral nectaries which provide carbohydrate, the plant feeds the ants as well.
In return for food and shelter the ants vigorously defend the plant against any animal that might come in contact with it. Their painful stings can deter cattle. In addition the ants kill seedlings of other plants growing adjacent to the acacia. In the forest, areas of clear ground around the acacias are quite apparent.
One interesting question is how the ants colonize the trees. Many seedlings and even a few larger trees lack ants.
Just for variety here is another ant tended plant I found alongside the road at night.
Please let us know what is up in your neck of the woods in the comments. No observation is too small for the bucket.
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"Spotlight on Green News & Views" will be posted every Saturday at noon Pacific Time and every Wednesday at 3:30 Pacific Time on the Daily Kos front page. Be sure to recommend and comment in the diary.
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