ANTS INVASION

The delicate alliance between shrub, fungus and tiny forest guardians

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SOMEWHERE IN THE AMAZONIAN understorey, beneath a great forest canopy, a cricket leaps on to the stem of a shrub. It’s the last leap it will ever make. It never gets to flex its legs again. It’s stuck, like fluff to Velcro. Dozens of tiny jaws appear on the plant’s surface, each grabbing part of the unfortunate insect’s body, holding it fast.

Over the next hour, the spreadeagled cricket is dispatched, dismantled and butchered, piece by piece. Its body vanishes, seemingly into the plant’s tissues. Yet the plant itself is not some kind of monstrous, carnivorous chimera. Instead, the insect’s brutal treatment is meted out by the plant’s own private army of ants.

While fascinating, there is nothing unusual about a relationship between ants and a plant. Their lives have become intertwined in many ways, and there are so many examples that such relationships even have a name: myrmecophily.