Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 21:19:47 -0400 From: Laurence T. May Jr. To: Myrmecology Subject: New York Times October 12, 1999 New York Times Ants Protecting Their Turf By HENRY FOUNTAIN Suburban home owners know that one way to stay on good terms with the neighbors is to keep the yard tidy, in particular making sure to prune overhanging tree branches that could bother the Joneses next door. A species of ant on the savannas of East Africa, it turns out, takes the same approach. But for the ants it's more than just the right thing to do: it's a question of survival. They have some pretty tough neighbors. The ant, Crematogaster nigriceps, is one of four species that live inside bulblike growths in the whistling thorn, a type of small acacia. Each tree is occupied by a single species, and the problem for C. nigriceps is that if the branches of the tree it is living in are in contact with others occupied by a different type of ant, it will be subject to attack. Not being particularly adept at fighting, C. nigriceps usually ends up being evicted from its own tree. So the ant, as a research team led by scientists at the University of California at Davis shows in a study reported in the journal Nature, has adapted by becoming the master gardener of the savannah. A colony carefully prunes its own tree, nipping off new growth so that the tree does not spread out and contact others. The researchers noted that the ants are selective pruners: they don't waste energy trimming a side of the tree that faces open space. k