{"id":118452,"date":"2024-08-21T10:34:07","date_gmt":"2024-08-21T10:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/08\/21\/many-flowers-and-ferns-lure-in-ants-as-bodyguards\/"},"modified":"2024-08-21T10:34:07","modified_gmt":"2024-08-21T10:34:07","slug":"many-flowers-and-ferns-lure-in-ants-as-bodyguards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/08\/21\/many-flowers-and-ferns-lure-in-ants-as-bodyguards\/","title":{"rendered":"Many flowers and ferns lure in ants as bodyguards"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Earth\u2019s Cretaceous Period is well-known for its huge, lumbering dinosaurs. But many smaller organisms were shaping the landscape at the same time. And the results of these battles can still be seen in today\u2019s woods and gardens.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

This period is when the first flowering plants appeared<\/a>. Some insects developed a taste for those and other plants. In time, some plants found a way to fight back \u2014 indirectly. They recruited ants to fend off savaging beetles, flies and caterpillars. And this tactic, it now turns out, started before Triceratops<\/em>, T. rex<\/em> or Dreadnoughtus<\/em><\/a> <\/em>prowled the Earth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Such ant bodyguards don\u2019t work for free. They take sweet, yummy nectar as payment. Both ferns and flowering plants started bribing ants to do battle for them at about the same time, a new study concludes. It puts that date at roughly 135 million years ago<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe tend to think that plants are these static organisms that animals eat and take advantage of,\u201d says Jacob Suissa. \u201cBut I think the story is the opposite.\u201d Plants don\u2019t just sit there and get eaten, he says. They defend themselves. As a plant evolutionary biologist, Suissa \u2014 who led the new work \u2014 studies how plants have changed over millions of years. He works at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

A nectar droplet oozes from a microscopic nectary on the fern Drynaria pilosa<\/em>.\u202f<\/span>J.Suissa\u202f<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

His team explains how it figured out plants first got ants to help them in the early Cretaceous.\u202fThe research appears in the May 24 Nature Communications<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

How to lure in ants: sweets\u00a0<\/h2>\n

Some plants make toxic chemicals to poison or deter herbivores<\/a>, as plant-eaters are known. Other plants, such as cacti, evolved spines to keep hungry bugs away.\u202fBut many flowering plants and ferns hire out their defense to ants.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Flowers ooze nectar<\/a> to lure bees and other pollinators. In much the same way, many flowering plants and ferns secrete this sweet juice to recruit sugar-hungry ants. But this ant lure doesn\u2019t come from flowers. Instead, it \u201cbleeds\u201d from other plant parts. Called nectaries (NEK-tah-reez), these can take many shapes. Some look like a cup. Others may appear to be a bump on a stem. Some nectaries are so tiny that you can\u2019t see them without a microscope.\u202f\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

In truth, the ants don\u2019t show up intending to defend a plant. They come in search of a nectar meal. Once there, though, they might run into a beetle or other herbivore munching on the plant. Ants may turn them into juicy snacks, or chase them away. Sometimes, ants will find eggs that had been laid on the plant by a predatory<\/a> herbivore and evict them. \u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Two
Ants on this fern (Pteridium aquilinum<\/em>) aren\u2019t just out for a hike. They\u2019ve come to snack on droplets of sweet nectar released by structures known as nectaries. While there, the ants may do battle with any plant predators they meet.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Only ferns and flowering plants have nectaries. Today, these two types of plants have little else in common. They started looking very different from each other about 400 million years ago. That\u2019s when they \u201cbranched off\u201d from each other on the plant family tree.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Researchers knew nectaries existed for a long time. They also knew that ferns and flowering plants both used them to bribe ants for their help. Suissa and two coworkers at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., wanted to know how long it took each branch of plants to recruit ants this way.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

They started by gathering a lot of data on ferns and flowering plants from other scientists. Then they used computer programs to compare those data.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Each branch of plants appears to have developed nectaries at roughly the same time, they now report. It was some 265 million years after evolution<\/a> had sent ferns and flowering plants on their own separate ways.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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