The fable of ants and crickets

Amazonian crickets take the night shift in the seed removal business.

Flávia Delgado Santana found out that, unlike in the famous fable, crickets worked as much as ants, at least in a terra firme forest in central Amazonia. In her doctoral research, Flávia determined that, in comparison with ants, the most abundant invertebrate seed dispersers throughout the tropics, crickets removed equivalent amounts of Marantaceae seeds. They also tended to remove larger seeds than ants. Unlike ants, however, crickets removed seeds at night, which may have played a role in that their importance as seed dispersers had not been noticed so far. The thesis was supervised by Flávia Costa and Fabrício Baccaro, and has been published in The American Naturalist. This is the article’s abstract:

Among invertebrates, ants are the most abundant and probably most important seed dispersers in both temperate and tropical environments. Crickets, also abundant in tropical forests, are omnivores and commonly attracted to fruits on the forest floor. However, their capability to remove seeds has been reported only once. We compared Marantaceae seed removal by crickets and ants to assess the role of crickets as secondary seed dispersers in Amazonia. Compared with ants, crickets dispersed an equivalent number of seeds and tended to disperse larger seeds farther. However, seed removal by crickets occurs mostly at night, suggesting that removal of arillate seeds by crickets on the tropical forest floor is probably being overlooked or wrongly attributed to other invertebrate groups. One potential consequence of seed dispersal by crickets may be a change in the local spatial distribution of arillate-seed species, due to lower aggregation around ant nests.