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anchers by protecting these root aphids from predators with little
mouth-built sheds, all the while milking them for their sugar.
Photo Gallery - The Lasius nursery
Lasius ants are “aphid experts.” They can climb up a tree and tell
which aphids like ants and which don’t just by sniffing with their
antennae. No dummies when it comes to sugar, they prefer the
sweetest sugar around. They’ll walk around trees sniffing aphid
butts until they find the species that produces the sweetest sugar.
Whoever wins the sweetest award gets protected and tended by
the ants. They’re so good at kicking out predators that a ladybug
will avoid laying eggs in any area where she even catches a whiff
of Lasius ants.
Just as some farmers need to kill part of their cow herd to eat
meat, Lasius ants need to kill some of their aphid herd for protein.
How can you choose your best beef from all of your bestproducing
Bessies? If you’re a Lasius ant, you follow your nose.
Lasius ants eat aphids from their herd that they or their sisters
haven’t tended. They can tell who’s been milked by sniffing the
aphids to see if they’ve been touched by a member of the colony.
But enough about sugar. Back to the engineering. Lasius ants
engineer soil. To understand how they help develop our dirt, we
first need to understand a little bit more about the good ol’ terra
firma, which props us up right this second, whether we think
about it or not. Even though dirt might seem as dead as dead
gets, healthy soil actually lives and breathes just like we do. As
dead plants and animals decompose, altering nutrients and
A Lasius queen tucked away with her young larvae in a chamber just
below the soil surface . - © Alex Wild
gasses, microorganisms scoot around gobbling up some
nutrients and turning them into other nutrients. Animals like
earthworms push the dirt about, letting air flow through, speeding
up biological processes that increase life-promoting properties
within the soil. When nobody contributes to these processes,
plants and animals can’t survive because the soil gets compacted
and hard, with nutrients concentrated in some places and not
others.
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