Ants scare jumbos from stripping tree cover

WASHINGTON - Tiny ants are scaring away jumbos about a billion times their size from stripping the tree cover, scientists have discovered.

Columns of angered ants will swarm elephant trunks to repel the ravenous beasts from devouring tree cover throughout drought-plagued East African savannas, reports the journal Current Biology.

“It really is a David and Goliath story, where these little ants are up against these huge herbivores… having a major impact on the ecosystems,” said Todd Palmer, biology professor at the University of Florida.

Conducting research in Kenya, where hungry elephants have destroyed much of the tree cover, study co-author Palmer and colleague Jacob Goheena noticed that elephants avoided tree species Acacia Drepanolobium, crawling with ants.

They decided to test whether these ants were repelling the jumbos by shielding the tree in exchange for shelter and the food it provided them in the form of a nectar solution.

So they offered elephants at a wildlife orphanage a choice between these “ant plant” trees, with and without ants on the branches, and their favourite species of tree, the Acacia Mellifera, to which the researchers added ants to some of its otherwise antless branches.

“We found the elephants like to eat the “ant plant” trees just as much as they like to eat their favourite tree species, and that when either tree species had ants on them, the elephants avoided those trees,” Palmer said.

Also, the researchers removed ants from “ant trees” out in the field to see if elephants would attack them undefended, and a year later found much more damage than on trees with ants.

Satellite images between 2003 and 2008 confirmed the ants were having a widespread, long-term effect throughout the savanna, he said.

The inside of an elephant’s trunk is tender and highly sensitive to thousands of biting ants swarming up into it, he said.

“These ‘ant plants’ are distributed throughout east Africa from southern Sudan all the way over to eastern Zaire and down through the horn of Africa and Tanzania,” said Palmer.

“So they potentially play a big role in terms of regulating carbon dynamics in these ecosystems.”