Abstract
Ant-aphid interactions may affect host plants in several ways, however, most studies measure only the amount of fruit and seed produced, and do not test seed viability. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess the effects of the presence of ant-aphid interactions upon host plant productivity and seed viability in two different contexts: isolated and within an arthropod community. For this purpose we tested the hypothesis that in both isolated and community contexts, the presence of an ant-aphid interaction will have a positive effect on fruit and seed production, seed biomass and rate of seed germination, and a negative effect on abnormal seedling rates, in comparison to plants without ants. We performed a field mesocosm experiment containing five treatments: Ant-aphid, Aphid, Community, Ant-free community and Control. We counted fruits and seeds produced by each treatment, and conducted experiments for seed biomass and germinability. We found that in the community context the presence of an ant-aphid interaction negatively affected fruit and seed production. We think this may be because aphid attendance by tending-ants promotes aphid damage to the host plant, but without an affect on seed weight and viability. On the other hand, when isolated, the presence of an ant-aphid interaction positively affected fruit and seed production. These positive effects are related to the cleaning services offered to aphids by tending-ants, which prevent the development of saprophytic fungi on the surface of leaves, which would cause a decrease in photosynthetic rates. Our study is important because we evaluated some parameters of plant fitness that have not been addressed very well by other studies involving the effects of ant-aphid interactions mainly on plants with short life cycles. Lastly, our context dependent approach sheds new light on how ecological interactions can vary among different methods of crop management.
Highlights
Plants are relatively immobile organisms and so they are intimately linked to the physical conditions of their environment and how it varies over the time [1]
In the presence of the entire arthropod community, the ant-aphid interaction had a negative effect on fruit and seed production in comparison to plants without ants
In our study we assessed the effects of the presence of an ant-aphid interaction on host plant fitness
Summary
Plants are relatively immobile organisms and so they are intimately linked to the physical conditions of their environment and how it varies over the time [1]. From microscopic [2] to large herbivores [3], can affect, both directly and/or indirectly, plant occurrence, evenness and productivity. Such organisms may affect plants indirectly by causing changes to environmental conditions [4, 5], or directly through disease, parasitism, competition and herbivory [6]. Ants are present in almost all environments [9] and may occur in basically all kinds of crops, independent of their isolation from natural areas [10]. Ants stand out as one of the most abundant arthropods in crop environments [11]. Ants play a key role in several ecological processes [12], such as the incorporation of organic matter into the soil [13, 14], predation on other arthropods [15] seed dispersal [16, 17] and as a mutualistic partner of plants [18], some caterpillar families [19] and honeydew producing insects [20, 21]
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