Davidson Diane W, Cook Steven C, Snelling Roy R, Chua Tock H
Department of Biology, University of Utah, 257 South, 1400 East, Salt Lake City, UT, 84112-0840, USA.
Science. 2003 May 9;300(5621):969-72. doi: 10.1126/science.1082074.
The extraordinary abundance of ants in tropical rainforest canopies has led to speculation that numerous arboreal ant taxa feed principally as "herbivores" of plant and insect exudates. Based on nitrogen (N) isotope ratios of plants, known herbivores, arthropod predators, and ants from Amazonia and Borneo, we find that many arboreal ant species obtain little N through predation and scavenging. Microsymbionts of ants and their hemipteran trophobionts might play key roles in the nutrition of taxa specializing on N-poor exudates. For plants, the combined costs of biotic defenses and herbivory by ants and tended Hemiptera are substantial, and forest losses to insect herbivores vastly exceed current estimates.
热带雨林树冠层中蚂蚁数量多得惊人，这引发了一种推测，即众多树栖蚂蚁类群主要以植物和昆虫分泌物为“食草动物”的食物来源。基于来自亚马逊地区和婆罗洲的植物、已知食草动物、节肢动物捕食者以及蚂蚁的氮（N）同位素比率，我们发现许多树栖蚂蚁物种通过捕食和 scavenging 获取的氮很少。蚂蚁及其半翅目营养共生体的微共生体可能在以低氮分泌物为食的类群的营养过程中发挥关键作用。对于植物来说，蚂蚁和被照料的半翅目昆虫的生物防御和食草行为的综合成本相当可观，森林因昆虫食草动物造成的损失远远超过目前的估计。
原文中“scavenging”未翻译完整，可补充为“食腐”等更准确表述，但按要求未添加解释说明。
