Ventilation of the giant nests of Atta leaf-cutting ants: does underground circulating air enter the fungus chambers?

Bollazzi, Martín; Forti, Luíz Carlos; Roces, Flavio

doi:10.1007/s00040-012-0243-9

Cited by 51 publications

(74 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Alternatively, higher-attine cultivars may simply consume more resources, with colony-farms relegating large amounts of harvested resources to trash heaps due to inefficient digestion of plant cellulose (Abril and Bucher 2002;Wirth et al 2003;de Fine Licht et al 2010). Such inefficiencies may incur additional foraging costs (e.g., leaf cutting is extremely energetically costly; Roces and Lighton 1995), while the potentially toxic CO 2 respired by fungi can accumulate within the nest (Kleineidam and Roces 2000;Bollazzi and Roces 2002;Bollazzi et al 2012). With these caveats in mind, we outline a new storage-benefits hypothesis regarding the eco-evolutionary costs and benefits of farming and describe how it could be tested with additional data.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Metabolism and the Rise of Fungus Cultivation by Ants

Shik

Santos

Seal

et al. 2014

The American Naturalist

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. abstract: Most ant colonies are comprised of workers that cooperate to harvest resources and feed developing larvae. Around 50 million years ago (MYA), ants of the attine lineage adopted an alternative strategy, harvesting resources used as compost to produce fungal gardens. While fungus cultivation is considered a major breakthrough in ant evolution, the associated ecological consequences remain poorly understood. Here, we compare the energetics of attine colony-farms and ancestral hunter-gatherer colonies using metabolic scaling principles within a phylogenetic context. We find two major energetic transitions. First, the earliest lower-attine farmers transitioned to lower mass-specific metabolic rates while shifting significant fractions of biomass from ant tissue to fungus gardens. Second, a transition 20 MYA to specialized cultivars in the higher-attine clade was associated with increased colony metabolism (without changes in garden fungal content) and with metabolic scaling nearly identical to hypometry observed in hunter-gatherer ants, although only the hunter-gatherer slope was distinguishable from isometry. Based on these evolutionary transitions, we propose that shifting living-tissue storage from ants to fungal mutualists provided energetic storage advantages contributing to attine diversification and outline critical assumptions that, when tested, will help link metabolism, farming efficiency, and colony fitness.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A2). Thus, high CO 2 concentrations observed in underground nests of some attine species (Kleineidam and Roces 2000;Bollazzi and Roces 2012) may be to be due to the sheer mass of fungus under cultivation rather than increased per-gram fungal respiration.…”

Section: Transitions In Colony Compositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Metabolism and the Rise of Fungus Cultivation by Ants

Shik

Santos

Seal

et al. 2014

The American Naturalist

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“…Fast a dj u s t m e n t s a b ov e g r o u n d l i k e co n s t r uc t io n / deconstruction of thatches are also known for some LCA species (Bollazzi & Roces 2010). Wind-induced nest ventilation is more important for open habitat species, like Atta vollenweideri (Forel) that live in clayish soil that limits gas and water movements (Cosarinsky & Roces 2011) or Atta capiguara (Gonçalves) and Atta laevigata (Smith) where nest shape acts on CO 2 /O 2 sink-source dynamics (Bollazzi et al 2012). Information on forest-dwelling LCA species (with the peculiarity of forest microclimatic conditions) are extremely scarce and the relative contributions of thermal convection and wind induces air movement are unknown so far, but thermal convection is hypothesized to be more relevant in (wind-poor) habitats of forest LCA species (Hölldobler & Wilson 2011).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatially Heterogeneous Nest-Clearing Behavior Coincides with Rain Event in the Leaf-Cutting Ant Atta cephalotes (L.) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

et al. 2015

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Leaf-cutting ants of the genus Atta construct the probably largest nests among ants and are ecosystem engineers because they alter light and nutrient availability at nest sites. Besides creating canopy gaps in the forest, workers remove all vegetation from atop their nest mounds. Here, we examined the extent and spatial distribution of this nest-clearing behavior by transplanting Licania tomentosa seedlings on Atta cephalotes (Linnaeus) nest mounds in the Atlantic forest in northeast Brazil and documented defoliation patterns by the workers. Within 9 days, workers removed around 53% of the total leaf area planted per colony. All colonies showed a synchronized start of defoliation after a rain event in the fifth night after the seedlings had been transplanted. Defoliation increased with time elapsed since transplanting and with the number of entrances surrounding each seedling. In addition, workers started defoliation on the top of the mound. In contrast, the distance to the next entrance and the size of the seedling did not affect the defoliation pattern. Defoliation was not part of the colony foraging activities but was identified as an element of nest maintenance. Possible cues triggering nest-clearing behavior and the potential link between nest-clearing activities and the control of microclimate of ant nests are discussed.

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“…Worker ants, however, are known to tolerate high levels of CO 2 , particularly workers of Atta, which can withstand severe hypoxia (Hebling et al 1992) and also behave normally at high concentrations of CO 2 , as found in nests of A. capiguara Gonçalves, 1944 andA. laevigata (Smith, 1858) of about 15 to 45% (Bollazzi et al 2012). Additional examples also come from ant species that inhabit mangrove swamps, in which levels of CO 2 inside the nests during nest closure reach 11% (Nielsen et al 2003).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%