Written by: Bai Xiaobai, Editor: Xu Dewen
If you're a lover of nature, if you look closely enough, you may find a meandering green stream in the muddy land, gurgling in the clearings between the woods. What the hell is this weird stream?
In fact, it's just a bunch of hard-working leaf-cutting ants carrying leaves in an attempt to cover up their machinations. A recent study published in the Royal Society Report b found that leafcutter ants can produce a greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide (n2o, or laughing gas), which may contribute to global warming.
Leafcutter ants are mainly distributed in Central America, South America, Mexico and the southern United States, and are highly differentiated ants, which are divided according to their body size, and work in an orderly, efficient and orderly manner. Most people who see the name of the leafcutter ant must think that it is an ant that eats leaves for a living, but it is not so simple. Leafcutter ants collect leaves and move them back to their nests to feed fungi, growing mushrooms to feed their larvae, and adult leafcutters mainly suck sap from leaves. Leafcutter ants can remove 8% of the leaves from the forest each year (equivalent to 100-500 kg/ha), they affect the environment and structure of the rainforest, and they are the true scavengers in the forest.
It seems that leaf-cutting ants are the real owners of the forest, maintaining the underlying ecological chain of the tropical rainforest. However, the latest research has found that these little guys seem to have gone too far, and they have even made a lot of greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (n2o)!
It all stems from the special habit of leaf cutter ants to love cleanliness, they do not pull everywhere, throw garbage everywhere, but will put it in a special garbage dump. Including dead fungi, decaying leaves, and the remains of dead ants, compost of organic matter forms in garbage dumps far from ant colonies, providing favorable conditions for complex chemical reactions. Carbon and nitrogen interact in compost, eventually producing an astonishing amount of nitrous oxide.
Fiona Soper, an entomologist at Cornell University in New York, and her team studied leaf-cutting ants in a 4-square-kilometer rainforest in southwestern Costa Rica, which has 22 anthills, each of which is a hot spot for making nitrous oxide. The researchers estimate that forests with anthills produce an average of 350 grams of nitrous oxide per hectare per year, roughly equivalent to the emissions of a sewage treatment tank, and three orders of magnitude higher than background emissions without ant involvement.
Although a single anthill does not appear to be enough to produce large amounts of greenhouse gases, the sum is still large, but the researchers believe that this is still unlikely to affect the global climate, or the impact on global warming is not yet clear, and more investigation and research are needed to calculate the contribution of nitrous oxide emitted by leafcutter ants to the global climate.
A recent study published in Global Change Biology found that invasive red fire ants have an astonishing ability to adapt to climate warming, rapidly occupying the ecological niche of other insects after they disappear, and their reproduction and expansion rate is up to 9 times that of when they first arrived in the United States. Are leaf-cutting ants also such a species, hard at carrying a large number of leaves to produce greenhouse gases, but they are trying to join forces with red fire ants to promote climate warming and occupy the hegemony of the entire earth?