ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Proponents of organic farming often speak of nature's balance in ways that sound almost spiritual, prompting criticism that their views are unscientific and nave. At the other end of the spectrum are those who see farms as battlefields where insect pests and plant diseases must be vanquished with the magic bullets of modern agriculture: pesticides, fungicides and the like.
Which view is more accurate? A 10-year study of an organic coffee farm in Mexico suggests that, far from being romanticized hooey, the "balance and harmony" view is on the mark. Ecologists John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto of the University of Michigan and Stacy Philpott of the University of Toledo have uncovered a web of intricate interactions that buffers the farm against extreme outbreaks of pests and diseases, making magic bullets unnecessary. Their research is described in the July/August issue of the journal BioScience.
The major players in the system---several ant species, a handful of coffee pests, and the predators, parasites and diseases that affect the pests---not only interact directly, but some species also exert subtle, indirect effects on others, effects that might have gone unnoticed if the system had not been studied in detail.
A key species in the complex web is the tree-nesting Azteca ant (Azteca instabilis). The ants aren't particular about the kind of tree they live in, but for some reason their nests are found in only about 3 percent of shade trees on the farm, and ant-inhabited trees aren't randomly distributed---they're found in clumps.
The researchers believe the clumpiness results, at least in part, from the ants' vulnerability to a parasitic fly. Ant colonies expand by sending off queens and broods to nearby trees, but when all the trees in an area have ant nests, the flies can more easily find ants to parasitize. So high-density clusters are preferentially attacked and eventually disappear, eith
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| Contact: Nancy Ross-Flanigan rossflan@umich.edu 734-647-1853 University of Michigan Source:Eurekalert |
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