ANTS AND ACACIA: These ants actually harm acacia in the absence of large herbivores by allowing infestations by other harmful insects, such as the parasitic scale bugs also pictured here.
Image: COURTESY OF TODD PALMER
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Acacia trees are the iconic shrub of the East African savanna. Their thorny thickets house a host of creatures and provide sustenance to the local charismatic megafauna, from elephants to zebras. In light of this continual foraging, the plants have struck a mutually beneficial bargain with several species of ants. The insect armies swarm intrusive browsers in exchange for housing and food. But according to new research in Science, it appears that without such browsing—a state of affairs the acacia might be thought to long for—the trees suffer.
Zoologist Todd Palmer and his colleagues examined the interdependence of one such acacia species—the whistling thorn tree, Acacia drepanolobium—the ants it hosts and the herbivores that eat it. He compared six such trees in Kenya that have been surrounded by an electrified fence since 1995 (by entomologist Truman Young of the University of California, Davis) with six trees open to local giraffes, elephants and other acacia-eaters.
In the absence of herbivores, the whistling acacia stopped producing little ant houses in hollow thorns—known as domatia—and excreting the sweet nectar that its bodyguard ants eat. But instead of spurring more growth, the acacias found themselves more than twice as likely to be providing a home to another type of ant—Crematogaster sjostedti—which do not defend the trees and rely on invasions of the bark-boring cerambycid beetle larvae to build the holes in which they dwell. "The cavity-nesting antagonistic ants actually promote the activities of the stem-boring beetle," says biologist Robert Pringle of Stanford University.
This, in turn, stunts the trees' growth and causes them to die twice as often than when they are being regularly eaten by giraffes, elephants and other large African herbivores. "The trees are actually making a shortsighted decision by defaulting on their end of the mutualism bargain," Pringle says. "If they sustained production of ant rewards in the absence of large mammals, they would reduce their probability of being taken over by this somewhat nasty antagonistic ant."
This counterintuitive result may apply only to the whistling thorn acacia, one of the only species of that genus in Africa that relies on ants as bodyguards rather than thorns and / or chemical defenses. After all, in the wake of disappearing large mammals across Africa, these other types of acacia have proliferated, says ecologist Jacob Goheen of the University of British Columbia.
But it does provide an example of how the disappearance or extinction of elephants, giraffes, zebras and other large herbivores in a region can have unexpected and unintended consequences—much like the boom in leaf-eating beetles and the lizards that prey on them shown in earlier work—whereas the decline of such mammals continues nearly continent-wide through the loss of habitat and overhunting.
"Large herbivores are tremendously important players in these systems," Pringle says. "Not just because of the direct effects they have upon plants, but also because of the myriad effects they exert on smaller, less conspicuous components of biodiversity." For want of an elephant, a protective ant species diminished and left the whistling thorn acacia in dire straits.
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5 Comments
Add Comment"The trees are actually making a shortsighted decision by defaulting on their end of the mutualism bargain," Pringle says. This is very interesting. Just how does a tree consider the situation and come to a decision as to how it will conduct itself?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The trees are actually making a shortsighted decision by defaulting on their end of the mutualism bargain," Pringle says.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"This is very interesting. Just how does a tree consider the situation and come to a decision as to how it will conduct itself?"
The statement by Pringle also caught my attention. Perhaps the species of Acacia in question has developed an aboreal cerebral cortex. Given the highly unlikely chances of that, and assuming Pringle is not animist nor misquoted, he may be spending a little too much time alone with his trees.
Symbiotic relationships are well known in nature. I just was not aware that, in at least certain cases, they occur as result of descision making performed by future planning plants.
This is very interesting, indeed.
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Edited by Ratko_USA at 01/11/2008 8:10 PM
Its a known fact, although not totally explained yet, that plants have some kind of nervous center. They react quickly to outside stimulation, like when grass is cut, it grows even faster and stronger, or the sun flowers using their strong cellulose fibers to grow tall and to rotate with the sun, fast and accurate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlants aren't intelligent, but have genetic smartness, i.e. through natural selection they adapted to react this way with external stimulation.
Thats why plants are so ancient. Simple and complex at the same time!
Hi all,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was not misquoted on Acacia drepanolobium's "decision-making" capacity, but I do confess to using a bit of shorthand to get my point across.
I certainly did not mean to imply that trees [i]consciously[/i] weigh options and make "forward-thinking" decisions. However, these trees, like many plants, are capable of adjusting their phenotypes in response environmental conditions. For example, work by our colleague Truman Young (also a co-author of the Palmer et al. study) has shown that when large herbivores are excluded, the trees produce shorter thorns. The "logic" (again, shorthand) on behalf of the trees seems clear: I am not being eaten, so it is a waste of precious energy to produce gigantic thorns; I would be better off using that same energy to grow bigger or produce more seeds.
The thorn story is an example of an "induced defense" -- these are defenses of the plant against herbivores that can be up- or down-regulated depending on how much herbivory the plant is actually experiencing.
Much has been written about this and related subjects. Wikipedia has a nice long entry about it, [url http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_defense_against_herbivor]here[/url]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_defense_against_herbivory
The trees, ants, and herbivores may actually be showing a kind of Gaian or meta-organism regulation, that is, at any particular time either ants or herbivores but not both are controlling numbers and growth of the acacias, which encourages biodiversity, and in helping the ecosystem, helps each being that is part of the ecosystem. Not only the numbers of acacias but the numbers of herbivores and both kinds of ants are regulated this way.
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