Once again my back yard near Park & Seventh reveals a nature story and maybe a lesson.
I noticed some deformed leaves on a plant, then saw some large black ants crawling around. Having studied the lives of insects since my childhood, I guessed there were aphids inside the leaves.
Ants and aphids can rely on each other in unique ways. The ants nurture the aphids in return for access to the honeydew they secrete. You can read about this "mutualism"
here.
The curled-over leaves form chambers where the aphids stay. The carpenter ants live nearby in holes created by chewing the wood of the back stairs. We found big piles of sawdust earlier this summer whre the busy ants had been working.
Here you can see the tiny aphids on the underside of a leaf.
This plant is a weed in a patch of Cosmos. Obviously, we could disrupt this whole symbiotic system by pulling up the weed, but the ants and aphids would most likely regroup on some other plant.
Here some ants are tending aphids on the stem of a Cosmos plant. The aphids suck juice from the plant and excrete the honeydew. As described in the article linked above, the ants stroke the aphids and "farm" them for the honeydew. Click on any photo to enlarge or to start a slideshow.
To humans, both the ants and aphids are pests, but their little society is fascinating to observe. There are probably a lot of analogies in the human world for this mutual dependence and control. I leave it to you, the readers, to make your own analogies.
--Bernice
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