When early-foraging ant species are displaced by later-foraging ant species due to climate change, early blooming plant species suffer. The presence of effective dispersers is as important as abiotic ...

Of the symbiotic relationships, mutualism, where both species benefit from the relationship, is the most exciting form. How two disparate species can form a cooperative where both benefit seems like ...

Mutualism describes a relationship that benefits both parties – the win-win of our world. A new study reports on a mutualism that goes from ants to trees to elephants to lions and zebras. It serves as ...

“We mostly think about plant signaling as targeting sight and smell, but here these plants are not so much giving a ‘shout out’ but a ‘shout back’ to the bats to come on over,” Rohan Clarke, an ...

Ant-plant mutualisms represent a cornerstone of tropical and subtropical ecology, in which plants provide shelter and nutritional rewards to ant colonies, and in return receive defence against ...

Scientists discovered that swollen-thorn acacias invested more in ant rewards during a drought, suggesting that mutualistic interactions play a crucial role in the plant’s survival, even during ...

Gaku Kudo of Hokkaido University and Elisabeth J. Cooper of the Arctic University of Norway have demonstrated that early snowmelt results in the spring ephemeral Corydalis ambigua flowering ahead of ...

Acid-filled pitchers complete with fangs. Labyrinthine chambers decorated with bristles. Leaves that snap shut in less than a ...

Plants, herbivores and parasitoids affect each other directly and indirectly; however, feedback effects mediated by host plant traits have rarely been demonstrated in these tritrophic interactions.

Pseudomyrmex spinicola ants feeding on nectar produced from extrafloral nectaries, located at the base of the leaves of swollen-thorn acacias (Vachellia collinsii). In this obligate mutualistic ...

Early snowmelt increases the risk of phenological mismatch, in which the flowering of periodic plants and pollinators fall out of sync, compromising seed production. Gaku Kudo of Hokkaido University ...