Ant Ecology

Abstract

Ants occur in almost every terrestrial habitat, from tundra north of the Arctic Circle (Brown, 1955) to the tip of Tierra del Fuego (Wilson, 1971). In many ecological communities ants are so dominant that all the available space appears to be the province of one colony or another, and they occupy a large number of roles in each community. They are important as predators, scavengers and consumers of seeds and in a wide variety of mutualistic interactions with many families of insects and plants (see Chapter 6). In many deserts ants are major consumers of the seeds of annual plants and actually depress the population growth rate of rodents who depend on the same food (Brown and Davidson, 1977). By contrast, in many temperate northern woods ants act as unwitting gardeners dispersing the seeds of approximately 30% of the herbaceous flora (Beattie, 1985). Ants may even be important in the formation of certain soils (Lyford, 1963). Though certain species have specialized, for example as seed harvesters, as farmers of Homoptera, or as leaf-cutters growing fungus gardens, most of the 12 000 or so living ant species have a mixed diet which allows for great plasticity in their foraging ecology. In Amazonian forests, ants occupy a greater diversity of roles than perhaps anywhere else and, together with termites, constitute 30% of the total animal biomass (Fittkau and Klinge, 1973).