Ant Gardens

Ant gardens are original associations involving a few species of arboricolous ants (i.e., nesting and dwelling on trees) with epiphytic plants (i.e., growing onto other plants), in which an ant society nests into the root system of a cluster of epiphytes. The presence of ants nesting in the roots of epiphytic plants is very common throughout the tropics. However, in most cases, this complex does not constitute an ant garden. Ant gardens, which are only known from the Neotropics and South-East Asia [4], arise when a colony settles first on the supporting tree and builds a nest, followed by the growth of seeds incorporated into the nest [2, 3, 5].

In 1901 the German naturalist Ernst Ule was the first to describe and name this kind of ant-plant association, which he observed in Brazil. Ule hypothesized that the ants initiated the installation of the epiphytes, hence his characterization of the complex as a “garden.” William Morton Wheeler, the leading specialist on ants of the first half...