Investigating the functional roles of ants in no-till agricultural systems

Ants are ubiquitous in many terrestrial ecosystems and play crucial roles in maintaining ecosystem functioning. In many agricultural systems, ants provide valuable services, including pest control. However, their presence and potential impact in northern temperate crop fields have been largely overlooked, primarily due to widespread use of tillage. In no-till fields, however, habitat stability and absence of soil disturbance appears to allow ants to colonize fields, persist, and influence crop production. To understand the functional role that ants can play in field crop production, at two research farms in Pennsylvania, we conducted a 2x2 factorial field experiment, manipulating presence and absence of a cover crop and ants. We first baited for ants to characterize their community, then reduced ant populations in half the plots. To assess the functional roles of ants, we deployed seed cards and conducted sentinel prey assays using waxworms and pea aphids to measure predation rates. Our results reveal influence of cover crops on ant communities and the extent that ant activity influences pest populations and damage to crop plants. Our first-year results may suggest that ant populations could play significant roles in no-till crop fields and emphasize that their influences could be enhanced by wider adoption of Integrated Pest Management and avoiding unnecessary insecticide use.