- Location
- Retired in Minneapolis
Ants repairing trees
- Thread starter Tom Dunlap
- Start date
KTSmith
Branched out member
- Location
- Maine, New Hampshire
Thanks Tom for the Newsweek article. I've attached the original paper upon which the feature article was written. I'm not sure how freely available that article is. I haven't yet read it closely. I do know we live in a wondrous world!
- Location
- Retired in Minneapolis
Thanks for additional reading. Today is going to be double digits below zero. A good day for reading.
- Location
- Retired in Minneapolis
From the bottom of page 66.
The writer seems to not know the Shigo dialect of tree talk. Heal and seal seem to have the more generic, public definition. That's easy enough to read over. It seems like they have actually found that the ants use some tissue material of the wounded plant to make up a poultice that stimulates the growth of replacement tissues that grow right in the wound area which would be healing. There is talk about what, in Shigo speak, calls sealing too.
All very interesting!
But here we demonstrate that ants will work to repair a living structure, using plant material from inside the stem. Light-colored parenchyma cells are used by foundress queens to seal the entrance hole they make when colonizing a new plant (references in Valverde and Hanson 2011), which may be the light-colored patch material seen in Fig. 1d.
Figure 3. Boxplot of hole diameters 2.5 hours and 24 hours after a hole was initially drilled into a Cecropia stem.67
In a symbiosis, repairing the hole hypothetically would allow the plant to conserve energy on repairing wounds, but this benefit may be unlikely because eventually the trees form natural scars around the wounds using their own defenses
The writer seems to not know the Shigo dialect of tree talk. Heal and seal seem to have the more generic, public definition. That's easy enough to read over. It seems like they have actually found that the ants use some tissue material of the wounded plant to make up a poultice that stimulates the growth of replacement tissues that grow right in the wound area which would be healing. There is talk about what, in Shigo speak, calls sealing too.
All very interesting!
But here we demonstrate that ants will work to repair a living structure, using plant material from inside the stem. Light-colored parenchyma cells are used by foundress queens to seal the entrance hole they make when colonizing a new plant (references in Valverde and Hanson 2011), which may be the light-colored patch material seen in Fig. 1d.
Figure 3. Boxplot of hole diameters 2.5 hours and 24 hours after a hole was initially drilled into a Cecropia stem.67
In a symbiosis, repairing the hole hypothetically would allow the plant to conserve energy on repairing wounds, but this benefit may be unlikely because eventually the trees form natural scars around the wounds using their own defenses
JCB
Branched out member
- Location
- Westport, Mass.
Makes me think of how folks use maggots to clean deep flesh wounds...except I'm pretty sure the maggots do not find a permanent home there.
evo
Been here much more than a while
- Location
- My Island, WA
Interesting and certainly will want to read much more about it (after I read these first!). Many times I’ve noticed how well compartmentalized ant (galleries?) are. Around here they seem to prefer hemlock with annous and western red cedar with pencil rot.
evo
Been here much more than a while
- Location
- My Island, WA
Oh f that…. I don’t think there is enough fire wood in Washington that would keep me comfortable in that
- Location
- Retired in Minneapolis
