|
Explanation: Behold
the tiny engineer! To many of us, this is a pest
species -- the notorious carpenter ant, known to chew up wood on house
sidings, decks, foundations, and more.
But there is more to this tiny adversary than that. This is a
"carpenter ant" -- so named for its love of
"wood-working," so to speak. In its natural environment,
though, it is a key player in turning decaying wood into fine-grained organic
material that then nurtures the soil and its innumerable living elements.
They do not consume the wood; they churn and chew it as they construct tunnels
and burrows, creating a fine sawdust-like material called frass.
Piles of frass is a sign that you are near the nest. It looks like
this:
Being mostly active at night, you
can locate some tunnel entrances during the daytime by overturning pieces of
large down wood on the forest floor and looking for larvae, frass, and tunnel
entrances.
So I call this mighty exoskeletoned invertebrate
the "carpenter engineer" ... because it serves to modify its
environment to a major extent, qualifying it as an "ecosystem
engineer" in the general sense. They provide vital ecological
functions in their natural environments (not my house) by aerating soils,
turning coarse wood into fine organic material, dispersing seeds, and more.
Information:
Jones, C.G., J.H. Lawton, and M. Shachak.
1994. Organisms as ecosystem engineers. Oikos 69:373-386.
|
Index |
Location | Search | About EPOW | ... Next >
Google Earth locations
