Devil's garden

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In myrmecology and forest ecology, a devil's garden is a large stand of trees in the Amazon rainforest consisting almost exclusively of a single species, Duroia hirsuta. Devil's gardens are immediately recognizable because the dominance of a single tree species is dramatically different from the biodiversity of the forest as a whole.

According to Deborah Gordon devil's gardens got their name because locals believed that an evil forest spirit "Chuyathaqi" lived in them.

Writing in Nature, biologist Megen Frederickson and Deborah M. Gordon of Stanford University and Michael J. Greene from the University of Colorado show that the ant Myrmelachista schumanni creates devil's gardens by systematically poisoning all plants in the vicinity except D. hirsuta, in which it nests. The ant poisons the plants by injecting formic acid into the base of the leaf. By killing these other plants, the ant creates many nest sites; a devil's garden may persist for 800 years.

Frederickson points out that this symbiosis is an example of niche construction.

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