Perhaps humans are still too slow to repair their only habitat, but some ants in Panama are not. At least, that’s what a 15-year-old boy with a slingshot discovered when he accidentally hit a pine tree. Cecropia with a ball of clay.
Alex Wcislo, a student at the International College of Panama, fired the shot one day during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19. He said he was bored and didn’t have much to do.
What he did notice, however, was that the clay ball went through a branch of the tree, which is known as an “anthill” tree. Trees have a symbiotic relationship with ants Aztec alfari that live in them, and ants are known to protect their trees from challenging herbivores.
When Alex returned the next day, the ants had already repaired the hole in the tree. So he and four of his high school friends wanted to know more, and when they did, their names were on the list of authors whose research on the discovery had just been published in the journal. Journal of Hymenoptera Research .
The teens were paired with scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), who had previously studied ant behavior.
Now, they wanted to investigate this new development
As with other known symbiotic relationships in the natural world, ants were unlikely to care much about a tree injury unless it posed a threat to their colony and brood. In fact, the scientists weren’t sure they cared, because this injury does not pose a direct threat to the food supply, the basic currency of their transactions with the trees.
But they found that the ants aztecs they went to work when the tree was injured. They began to plug holes drilled in 22 trees that were known to be ant houses throughout the community of Cárdenas and in the nearby Urban Forest of Cárdenas. The holes were intentionally created to replicate the initial blow of the 9mm slingshot.
The young scientists then collected the data from June to November 2020, during the rainforest’s rainy season. On average, the ants started their repair work in about 2.5 hours and typically closed the tree wound within 24 hours. If the wound site was close to an ant colony, the repair was faster and was completed in about five hours.
builder ants
The ants appeared to use fiber from the tree itself, probably using tree sap to bind the fibers together and seal the wound. The STRI researchers were unable to find evidence of secretions coming from the ants themselves, which would suggest an even stronger symbiosis with the tree. They couldn’t rule it out though.
“The ants carried small pieces of plant material and covered the hole inside and outside the nest; in the latter case, the ants emerged from an adjacent internode with building materials,” the study authors said. “The ants applied their pulp into the hole by working inward around the entire circle.”
But how would ants know how to respond to a slingshot wound? The short answer is no, but they likely evolved to repair tree wounds caused by sloths. Bradypus with sharp nails that live in the same trees.
There were some differences in behavior that warrant further study. Not all ant colonies did the repair work when the wounds were placed on their trees. Scientists think it could be because a hole didn’t pose a direct threat to its own brood, or it could have to do with the age of the tree and the size of the colony.
By Lauren Fagan. Article in English