These plants fight the ant species peacefully by giving their own apartments peacefully.
As it happensThis plant selects the ants species by giving their small apartments to the species of ants in peace.
When Guelume Chomiki was chopped into the bulbus part of the plant growing on the edge of a tree in Fiji, he hoped that he was full of ants.
Eventually, it was Chomiki and their colleagues who proved for the first time Squaleleria plants have a symbiotic relationship with antsTo provide shelter in exchange for nutrients.
However, he did not expect, however, to discover two colonies of ants from two different species inside the same basketball-gent-shaped tuber.
Chomki, a evolutionary biologist at Darham University in UK, said, “It is not really understandable.” As it happens Host Nil Koxle. “Ants are considered very aggressive and regional.”
Chomaki is the lead author of a new study, Published in scienceThis indicates how squaleleria plant house ants species form their own small walls with different entrances.
Researchers compared it to a landlord/tenant relationship.
They have to be kept separate
Squaleria plants are epiphytes, which means they do not have roots that connect with soil. Instead, they grow above other plants and trees.
They produce round, mostly hollow tubers that Chomiki says “Vishal potatoes are the size of a football ball or like. Even bigger. ,
In Fiji, they are locally known as the “testicle of trees”.
“They are huge, quite haired hanging things to trees. So I think the name is quite self-influential,” Chomki said.
Because these plants are not contained, they rely on other sources for their nutrients. This is what ants come from here.
Tubers make an outstanding housing for ant colonies, which provides them protection from elements and predators. In turn, ants fill the tubers with detritus and defecation, which provide livelihood for the plant.
But when squaleleria loves ants, and ants love squaleleria, ants usually do not like other groups of ants.
“In general, a species does not collaborate with many unrelated partners,” Chomiki said. “Because the same partners will compete for the same resources, and this can lead to collapse of the entire system.”
The squaleleria plant, it is detected, is a solution of this puzzle. Chomiki states that 3D scan shows that the tubers have a “network of galleries”.
“These galleries are not carved by ants. They are made by the plant itself. All these plants are genetics,” Chomiki said. “All ants are in separate compartments, and this is what makes the system stable.”
Breaking obstacles leads to massacre
Each compartment has its own entrance to the outside, found in the study, but they completely get away from each other.
When Chomiki and their colleagues broke those walls, all the hells became loose to see what would happen.
“They have been living together for years, but second that I cut these walls that separate them, a big fight (out), and in half an hour, much more ants died,” he said.
Aaron Fairweather, an entomologist in Antomologist, who was not involved in the study, called it “super cool”, and says the conclusions describe “the untrustable world of complexity in these micro-habits”.
“I have studied a lot of ant/plant interactions,” he said. “Find out about, you know, such an apartment-style position that is a group of different ant species of this plant is really attractive.”
After making Fairweather aware of the existence of each other, it was not surprising to know the ants in squaleeria plants.
There are an estimated 20 quadon ants on the planetAnd Fairweather says they often fight with each other.
“One of the interesting things about ants is that they are so successful in the environment that they no longer need to compete with environmental factors or other species,” Fairweather told the CBC.
“But they have to compete with other ants, which are like them as successful.”
And when they fight, Fairweather says, it is not beautiful.
He said, “They start catching legs and tear the limbs and the antenna goes flying and is popping heads,” he said. “It is cruel.”
All more reasons, then, for them there is some space for themselves inside their squaleria homes.
“Many with ants … forming symbiosis with species of ants is something that was always predicting, not possible. You know, the system may not be stable. And here I have shown that it is really possible,” Chomiki said.
“These compartments, these apartments, are actually a very, very efficient way to maintain cooperation between different species of ants within this plant.”
