A surprising friendship between an insect-eating pitcher plant and the ants that live on them shows the two teaming up against mosquito larvae in order to keep them from stealing all the plant’s nutrients, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.
The discovery comes after years of speculation by scientists, who have watched the Componotus schmitzi ants swim and dive in the plant’s digestive fluids and sip its nectar, as to what was in it for the plant.
The fact that the plants harboring ants grew bigger than those without, however, indicated that somehow the plants stood to gain from the relationship.
In the new study, scientists show how nutrients from ants to their plant hosts and that plants colonized by insects receive more nitrogen than those without.
Furthermore, the ants appear to increase the plant’s capture efficiency by keeping traps clean as well as protecting them by hunting mosquito larvae that otherwise breed in the plant’s fluids and suck up its nutrients.
Based on their observations, the researchers also suggest in the study that the nutrients the plant would lose to the flies are instead recycled back to them as ant colony wastes.
"Kneeling down in the swamp amidst huge pitcher plants in a Bornean rainforest, it was a truly jaw-dropping experience when we first noticed how very aggressive and skilled the Camponotus schmitzi ants were in underwater hunting: it was a mosquito massacre!" author lead Mathias Scharmann of the University of Cambridge said in a press release. "Later, when we discovered that the ants' droppings are returned to the plant, it became clear that this unique behaviour could actually play an important role in the complex relationship of the pitcher plant with the ants."
Such a relationship, that of animals helping to mitigate the damage to a plant caused by “nutrient thieves,” represents a new type of mutualism in the animal kingdom, according to the scientists.
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