Ecological strategies of (pl)ants: Towards a world-wide worker economic spectrum for ants.

ABSTRACT: Current global challenges call for a rigorously predictive ecology. Our understanding of ecological strategies, imputed through suites of measurable functional traits, comes from decades of work that largely focussed on plants. However, a key question is whether plant ecological strategies resemble those of other organisms.Among animals, ants have long been recognised to possess similarities with plants: as (largely) central place foragers. For example, individual ant workers play similar foraging roles to plant leaves and roots and are similarly expendable. Frameworks that aim to understand plant ecological strategies through key functional traits, such as the 'leaf economics spectrum', offer the potential for significant parallels with ant ecological strategies.Here, we explore these par

SUBMITTER: Gibb H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10084388 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature