Ant nest architecture and seed burial depth: Implications for seed fate and germination success in a myrmecochorous savanna shrub
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Placement of seeds in favourable microsites by inhumation in ant nests is considered a principal advantage of myrmecochory. However, nest chambers may be too deep to allow seedling emergence. In this case, successful germination requires secondary transport of seeds to shallower sites. Little is known about the architecture of nests of seed-dispersing ants and the locations within nests to which seeds are initially transported. These data are essential to assess the importance of secondary transport for germination success of seeds. We studied dispersal of Manihot esculenta subsp. flabellifolia seeds by Ectatomma brunneum ants in French Guianan savannas. We followed movements of seeds within nests by offering marked diaspores to foraging workers, observing transport into the nest, then excavating to determine locations of marked seeds. In 4 nests, chambers ranged from 2 to 40 cm deep. Because elaiosomes are fed to brood, Manihot diaspores were initially transported to deep chambers, where brood was concentrated. Recovered diaspores had been carried to chambers 14–40 cm deep, all deeper than the maximum burial depth for emergence (= 13.8 cm) predicted from the mass (= 0.13 g) of Manihot seeds. Nest architecture thus makes secondary vertical transport of seeds crucial for dispersal success of this species. Failure of secondary transport may be an underestimated mortality factor in myrmecochorous plants.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".