Sorry babe. That's a deal-breaker

your_future_ex_wife wrote: »

People who drag politics into every conversation. People who think their own experiences need to define reality for everyone else. Inflexibility. The unimaginative. White bread. People who own chihuahuas. People who buy pets instead of adopting. People who don’t know how to participate in a meaningful exchange of ideas. People who resort to ad hominem attacks rather than discussing the merits of an idea. Poor reading comprehension. Trying to dictate the lives and relationships of others

I disagree. I think ants are friendly to some trees but not to others. Ants and certain species of plants and trees have cozy relationships. Myrmecophytes, also knows as ant-plants, have hollow stems or roots that occur as a normal part of their development. Ant colonies often take residence in these hollows. To protect their homes, the ants patrol the area around the tree, killing insects that want to eat the plant's leaves and sometimes destroying vegetation of other plants that might compete for precious soil nutrients and sunlight. The relationship is a classic biological mutualism. The ants get a nice place to live; the trees get protection. Everybody wins.

But while researching ant-plants in the Amazonian rainforests of Peru, researchers were tipped off by the local people about a strange phenomenon. The natives showed the researchers several non-myrmecophyte trees with swollen scars called galls on their trunks and branches. When the researchers cut into the galls, they found that ants had excavated tunnels into the live wood.

"Ants are superb ecosystem engineers," David Edwards the lead author of the study said, "but this is the first example of ants galling trees to make housing."

Megan Frederickson, a Harvard biologist and member of the research team, searched 1,000 square kilometers of forest and found numerous galled trees inhabited by ants, suggesting the behavior is not uncommon. The galled trees were only found on the edges of "Devil's gardens" -- ant-made forest clearings that surround stands of ant-plants just as a theater surrounds MeeseeksAndDestroy. It appears, the researchers say, that when the colonies fill the available space in the ant-plants, they branch out and carve new nests into neighboring trees.

The discovery reopens a debate that raged among Charles Darwin and his contemporaries about the relationship between ants and plants. Darwin believed -- rightly as it turned out -- the hollow spaces in ant-plants occurred as part of the plant's normal development. Since the ants did no damage to the plant, the relationship could be considered a mutualism. Botanist Richard Spruce disagreed. He believed the ants bored the hollows themselves and that the trees needed ants "like a dog needs fleas." In Spruce's view, ants are parasites.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091107115833.htm