Eva Colberg describes her ongoing research at Shaw Nature Reserve. She is a Ph.D. student in the Biology Department at the University of Missouri St. Louis.
In the late 1940s, Ohio-born entomologist Mary Talbot spent her days crouched in the woods of St. Charles, MO, tracking ant activity in painstaking detail through the seasons. Similarly, last summer I tried my hand at watching ants in the woodlands of Shaw Nature Reserve, with the addition of crumbled pecan shortbread cookies and the help of my field assistant, Dayane Reis. Foraging ants flocked to the buttery feast, the contrast of the crumbs’ sandy color against dark soil and leaf litter allowing us to easily follow the cookie thieves back to their nests.
A plot of flagged ant nests (found by following cookie-bearing ants) in the Dana Brown Woods, one of the management units at Shaw Nature Reserve.
We watched at least seven different species of ants run off with the cookie crumbs, but I was most interested in the winnow ant (Aphaenogaster rudis). Reddish-brown, long-legged, and narrow-waisted due to a double-segmented petiole (the connection between the abdomen and thorax), the winnow ant worker is an elegant lady. She is also remarkably swift-footed and strong, adept at carrying chunks of pecan cookie or naturally occurring analogs.
A winnow ant (Aphaenogaster rudis) worker, with the petiole and post-petiole that give the species its svelte waist. From her head to the end of her abdomen, this ant is about 4.5 mm long.
To an ant, a cookie more or less resembles an insect carcass, a staple of many ant diets. Chemically and nutritionally, the seeds of many of Missouri’s spring-flowering herbs also resemble a delicious dead insect (or cookie). From an ant’s point of view, this means food for larvae. From a seed’s point of view, this means dispersal. Hitchhiking to an ant’s nest gives the seed a new location to germinate and grow away from the parent plant, and potentially a multitude of other benefits such as escape from predation or better soil conditions. In any case, this is ant-mediated seed dispersal, or myrmecochory.
A field ant (Formica subsericea) grabs a bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) seed by its elaiosome, the oily, nutritious appendage that most resembles a dead insect and attracts ants.
In other parts of the world, benefits of myrmecochory include enhanced survival and germination after fire. In arid, fire-prone areas of both Australia and South Africa, ants bury seeds deep enough to buffer the intense heat of fire, but shallow enough that the heat weakens the seed coat and increases the odds of germination. Thus, the ants protect the seed from the flames while still providing exposure to a Goldilocks level of heat.
Just as in Australia and South Africa, fire is (or was, and with the help of land managers is once again becoming) also a frequent occurrence in Missouri. At Shaw Nature Reserve, managers use prescribed burns to restore an open structure to the reserve’s oak-hickory woodlands. But, is ant-mediated seed dispersal interacting with fire the same way here as in those other fire-adapted ecosystems?
This is a key question of my dissertation research at University of Missouri St. Louis. Using cookies to find winnow ant nests last summer helped me test methods and plan out my experiments for this coming year. Specifically, I will be tracking where the ants take their seeds, whether ants disperse seeds more or less in the year after a fire, and whether the presence and timing of surface fire affects the germination of the seeds after dispersal. Stay tuned!
You can keep up with Eva Colberg on Twitter (@ColbergEva) or by checking out her science communication initiative Science Distilled STL.
Natural History of Ecological Restoration 