Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [188]
20. MJF Brown, ANM Bot, AG Hart 2006, Mortality rates and division of labor in the leaf-cutting ant, Atta colombica, J. Insect Sci. 6: 1–8.
21. Among people, sanitation positions are made more desirable by relatively high pay and good job benefits; see Elizabeth Royte, Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (London: Little, Brown, 2005).
22. ANM Bot, CR Currie, AG Hart, JJ Boomsma 2001, Waste management in leaf-cutting ants, Ethol. Ecol. Evol. 13: 225–237.
23. AG Hart, ANM Bot, MJF Brown 2002, A colony-level response to disease control in a leaf-cutting ant, Naturwissenschaften 89: 275–277.
24. HM Hull-Sanders, JJ Howard 2003, Impact of Atta colombica colonies on understory vegetation and light availability in a neotropical forest, Biotropica 35: 441–445; and AG Farji-Brener, AE Illes 2000, Do leaf-cutting ant nests make “bottom-up” gaps in neotropical rain forests? A critical review of the evidence, Ecol. Lett. 3: 219–227.
25. In one forest in Costa Rica all the soil is turned over by leafcutters every two or three centuries—fast work from the standpoint of a tree; see I Perfecto, J Vandermeer 1993, Distribution and turnover rate of a population of Atta cephalotes in a tropical rain forest in Costa Rica, Biotropica 25: 316–321.
26. LSL Sternberg, MC Pinzon, MZ Moreira, P Moutinho, EI Rojas, EA Herre 2007, Plants use macronutrients accumulated in leaf-cutting ant nests, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. Ser. B 274: 315–321; and BL Haines 1978, Element and energy flows through colonies of the leaf-cutting ant, Atta colombica, in Panama, Biotropica 10: 270–277.
27. AG Farji-Brener 2005, The effect of abandoned leaf-cutting ant nests on plant assemblage composition in a tropical rainforest of Costa Rica, Ecoscience 12: 554–560; and AG Farji-Brener, CA Medina 2000, The importance of where to dump the refuse: Seed banks and fine roots in nests of the leaf-cutting ants Atta cephalotes and Atta colombica, Biotropica 32: 120–126.
28. Young plants may survive for a time in the surface refuse of Atta colombica, where sanitation ants troll for waste but their plant-snipping sisters fear to tread; see Alejandro Farji-Brener (personal communication) and M Garrettson, JF Stetzel, BS Halpern, DJ Hearn, BT Lucey, MJ McKone 1998, Diversity and abundance of understorey plants on active and abandoned nests of leaf-cutting ants (Atta cephalotes) in a Costa Rican rain forest, J. Trop. Ecol. 14: 17–26.
29. JW Dalling, R Wirth 1998, Dispersal of Miconia argentea seeds by the leaf-cutting ant Atta colombica, J. Trop. Ecol. 14: 705–710.
30. I wouldn’t be surprised if the costs to an ant plant of maintaining a symbiosis with ants can at times approach the costs in lost foliage from leafcutters and herbivores for many plants; see, e.g., M Heil, B Fiala, KE Linsenmair, G Zotz, P Menke, U Maschwitz 1997, Food body production in Macaranga triloba: A plant investment in anti-herbivore defense via symbiotic ant partners, J. Ecol. 85: 847–861.
31. The “higher attines” include the leafcutters (Acromyrmex and Atta) and at least two other genera that use dried leaves for their gardens.
32. Even leafcutters excrete on their mulch to get the garden started, much as human farmers use compost and manure.
33. For this timeline and details, see TR Schultz, SG Brady 2008, Major evolutionary transitions in ant agriculture, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 105: 5435–5440; UG Mueller, C Rabeling 2008, A breakthrough innovation in animal evolution, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 105: 5287– 5288.
34. The “ecological release” that results from moving of a species away from its parasites and competitors can lead to expanded resource use in what can be thought of as a “transplanted landscape”; see Edgar Anderson, Plants, Man, and Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952); and chapter 16.
35. As the earliest farming communities grew, people became smaller, weaker, and more disease ridden than their hunter-gatherer ancestors; see T. Douglas Price and Anne Birgitte Gebauer, eds., Last Hunters,