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COPYRIGHT 2005 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
I displaced a rock in Tennessee. Underneath, huddled at one edge of the exposed dirt, was a colony of ants. The slender ants moved slowly in the cool spring morning, and I had a long look at them before they vanished down their hole. The queen was fat and glamorous. Around her were tiny, silver eggs, chubby larvae, and pupae folded like mummies inside translucent cases. At the edge of the colony, surrounded by a small pile of ant garbage--heads, legs, and other shiny but unidentifiable parts--were two seeds. How had the seeds found their way into the ants' tunnels?
With patience and the fortitude to sit still when an ant clambers over you, you might easily learn the answer for yourself. The first thing to do is to turn over the next rock, or poke into a nearby log. Rocks and logs are windows into the secret life of the soil; the views are fleeting but, at least to children and biologists, mesmerizing. Over many seasons of rock-turning and log-poking, I have found thousands of ant colonies, many containing seeds. Among the seeds have been dozens of plant species, including bedstraw, buttercup, fairy bells, green and gold, ornamental onion, silverleaf, violet, woodrush, and Wright's nut-rush. You, too, will find them, in small piles, inside ant colonies or on the small hummocks of garbage deposited neatly nearby. If you live in eastern North America, you might discover the seeds of half the species of forest and meadow flowers, perhaps even more.
As long as you replace the rocks carefully, the ants will resume their normal activity when you leave, and you can revisit the same stones at a later date to check the fate of the seeds. On my own return later that same spring, the seeds that had looked forlorn and abandoned were germinating, rising out from under the rock I had turned. Trilliums and violets emerged in small clumps from between ant heads and cricket legs. If I could have scanned the entire forest, I would have seen seedlings poking out of hundreds of ant colonies in every green acre.
By all appearances, ants love gardening--but why? What do they get in return for their effort? Are they particular about which seeds they bring home? And what consequence, if any, does winding up in ant garbage have for the plants? We biologists have tracked the fate of perhaps a million seeds to address these questions (ours is a ridiculous but delightful profession). We still don't have all the answers, but we have learned that vast numbers of plant species throughout the world attract ants to their seeds and encourage their six-legged associates to carry them underground. And the benefits--whatever they are--appear to be great, as...
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