Child Discovers The Dynamic Relationship Between Insects And Plants

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Two years ago, young Hugo Deans, a resident of Pennsylvania, stumbled upon some red-colored seeds near an ant’s nest in his backyard. Hugo’s excitement soared as he realized that ants were capable of collecting seeds, and he eagerly shared his discovery with his father Andrew, an entomologist at Penn State. Surprisingly, Andrew was also unaware of this behavior exhibited by ants.

Little did Hugo and Andrew know at the time, but this chance finding would pave the way for a remarkable scientific revelation, unveiling a complex interdependence between oaks, ants, and wasps, which illuminates the profound interconnectedness of our planet.

This discovery establishes a connection between two distinct relationships involving plants and insects. The first relationship involves cynipid wasp species, which prompt oak trees to develop “galls”—small protective bubbles made of leaf matter—around the wasps’ eggs that they lay on the leaves. This ingenious tactic eliminates the need for the wasps to guard their nests.

The second relationship revolves around a phenomenon known as myrmecochory, which refers to the dispersal of seeds by ants. Specific wild North American plants produce edible appendages on their seeds, enticing ants to carry them back to their nests where the seeds can safely germinate.


What Hugo found and Andrew recently expounded upon in the esteemed journal American Naturalist is the profound connection between these two behaviors. It turns out that the cunning wasps not only manipulate the oak trees but also exert their influence over the ants, akin to the manipulative tactics of the Godfather.

“First, we observed that, while these galls normally contain a fleshy pale-pink ‘cap,’ the galls near the ant nest did not have these caps, suggesting that maybe they were eaten by the ants,” Andrew Deans said when he spoke to Penn State press.

“Ultimately, this led us to discover that gall wasps are manipulating oaks to produce galls, and then taking another step and manipulating ants to retrieve the galls to their nests, where the wasp larvae may be protected from gall predators or receive other benefits. This multi-layered interaction is mind-blowing; it’s almost hard to wrap your mind around it.”

One of the experiments that provided evidence for this hypothesis involved the introduction of ants to galls as potential food sources. These oak galls consist of two components: the soft gall body and a structure called “kapello,” derived from the Greek word for “cap.”

Interestingly, the ants displayed an attraction towards the kapellos and the combination of gall body and kapello, but they showed no interest in a third option consisting solely of the gall body.

So, why did this happen? Well, John Tooker, a colleague of Deans and also a professor of entomology, made a significant discovery. He found that the kapellos contain fatty acids that closely resemble the dietary composition of deceased insects, which are the most common prey for scavenging ants.


“The fatty acids that are abundant in gall caps and eliosomes seem to be mimicking dead insects,” Tooker said. “Ants are scavengers that are out trying to find and grab anything that’s suitable to bring back to their colony, so it’s not an accident that the gall caps and the elaiosomes both have fatty acids typical of dead insects.”

Oak galls were once abundant in American broadleaf forests, to the extent that they were utilized for livestock fattening. This observation led the research team to propose a hypothesis that ants initially started collecting these galls for their caps. Subsequently, other North American plants, such as bloodroot, which possess seeds with edible appendages called “elaiosomes,” evolved to exploit the ants’ existing behavior of gathering seed-sized, fatty-acid-rich objects.

Regarding the involvement of wasps in this process, it remains a topic that the team, now equipped with a new research grant, will further investigate. Hugo, who is now 10 years old, takes pride in contributing to such a significant advancement in knowledge.

“I bet other kids have made similar discoveries but never knew how important they might be,” Hugo also said. “I feel really happy and proud to know I was part of an important scientific discovery. It’s weird to think just some ants collecting what I thought were seeds was actually an important scientific breakthrough.”

 

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