Lemon ants: they burn out all living things around their nest (5 photos)

The South American rainforest is overcrowded. Every inch is home to a ton of bugs, plants, fungi, and other life forms. But sometimes you can stumble upon a silent wasteland of up to several dozen square meters.





Our heroes are the devastaters.

There is nothing here except one type of tree, dried organic matter, and a suspicious smell of citrus. This is the "Devil's Garden" - the domain of lemon ants, who burned all the nature here to hell with acid.



Yes, this view is not very scary, but such desolation is abnormal for a tropical forest.





These ants smell very strongly of lemon! Can you imagine how sour their butts are?

The thing is that a colony of unremarkable ants lives exclusively inside one species of tree called Duroia hirsuta. The insects and the tree have entered into symbiosis. The ants burn out all organic matter within a radius of several meters with their acid, and the plant provides a wonderful hollow house, the ability to use its leaves and catch flying insects. At the same time, the tree has no competitors for territory, and it can reproduce freely.



The tree itself is obviously immune to the ants' acid.

The union turned out to be so beneficial that now we are seeing accelerated themes of expansion of both species. More and more areas of the jungle are turning into scorched "Devil's Gardens". However, the strategy is not ideal. The ant colonies are still controlled by birds and aggressive nomadic ants.



The tree suffers from the ants cutting off the leaves for their needs, but this is a small price to pay for the monopoly on the territory around it.