If you place small seeds (< 20 mg, e.g. fig seeds) on the ground in forest in tropical and subtropical Asia, small ants soon appear and carry them away. I assume the seeds are eaten, but I cannot find any publication that shows this. Pheidole ants often remove seeds and they have a major caste with (relatively) enormous heads. They look as if they could crush small seeds. Has anyone observed this, or found crushed seeds in Pheidole nests?
Tharaka Wijerathna
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.2307/1940676
check this out
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R. T. Corlett
Thank you, Tharaka! I missed this one. I wonder if anyone has any observations from tropical Asian forests. Pheidole is a fairly uniform genus, but it is a very different habitat from Australian sclerophyll vegetation.
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