Can Wild Animals Grow Their Own Food

gardening for wildlife, frogs, leaf-cutter ants, spotted bowerbird, termites, ambrosia beetles

This National Wildlife Photograph Contest entry was taken by Anne Zeneski, who built this pond in her backyard in North Carolina. The pond attracts frogs and other wild creatures.

May is Gardening for Wild fauna Month, in which green thumbs cultivate plants specifically to provide homes and food for wild animals. All the same, some animals have the office of cultivator into their ain, uh, hands and grow their own gardens. Here are four such creatures:

Ant farmers: Humans beginning began cultivating crops about 10,000 years ago, merely ants got into the program long before that: Using genetic studies, scientists determined a few years ago that a pioneering ant species began growing its ain food almost 50 one thousand thousand years past. The well-nigh highly developed insect agriculturalist today is the leafage-cutter ant, which dates back about 10 one thousand thousand years and includes nearly 50 species native to South and Fundamental America and to the southern The states. Here'southward how these insects, which live in hole-and-corner nests that tin cover 6,500 square feet and firm 8 1000000 residents, go about gardening: Specialized workers called mediae forage around their nest for plant material, cut off pieces of foliage—they can strip clean a citrus tree in a single day. They lug the plant cloth to the nest and hand it off to minims, specialized workers that fragment the leaf pieces into a sort of mulch and feed information technology to fungi beingness cultivated in the nest. The queen, which is the only member of the pismire colony that lays eggs, lives in the mucus garden. There her eggs hatch, and the larvae feed on the convenient food source (adults feed on leaf sap). These ants and their relatives represent the earth's first known farmers.

Termites: Some termite species, which live in colonial nests similar those of ants, also grow fungus gardens. The insects build spongy "combs," which may include nutritious termite carrion as an ingredient, and grow fungi on the combs. The termites feed on the fungi, which do good from the protection of the insects and the habitat they provide.

Ambrosia beetles: These weevil relatives bore into and carve tunnels in dead or dying trees. They carry sure fungi in special receptacles on their bodies and deposit fungus spores in the tunnels, where the fungi abound, cartoon nutrients from the wood. Rather than eat wood themselves, the beetles and their larvae feed on parts of the fungi. When larval beetles become adults, they collect fungus spores and wing off to bore into new trees and restart the process. Well-nigh three,000 protrude species use this strategy.

Bowerbirds: Lest you think that wildlife gardeners are all about mucus and insects, allow'southward take a look at the spotted bowerbird, a species studied in Queensland, Australia, where recent inquiry discovered that the birds engage in gardening, of a sort. Male spotted bowerbirds build elaborate nests, or bowers, from twigs and decorate them with various objects to attract females. I decorative object much loved by females, and hence much sought by males, is the yellowish-green, often purple-tinged drupe of the irish potato bush—in fact, more berries on the bower means better mating success for the male. Males don't more often than not build bowers in areas where the berries grow in abundance, but by the fourth dimension a bower is a year old, it usually has a few dozen potato bushes growing nearby, giving the male more opportunity to decorate with more berries. The males throw shriveled berries outside the bower, affecting the distribution of the potato bush. Not precisely agriculture as ants and humans may know it, but even so a course of opportunistic gardening. Information technology also is the first known case of the cultivation of a nonfood plant by a nonhuman species.