Aphid-tending ants in agrosystems: ecological and ethnobiological approaches

Abstract

The agricultural environments are extremely important for the human survival and also acting as the refuge for a great biological diversity. In such environments, the ants are shown as main characters of several ecological processes such that, directly or indirectly, affect the agricultural production. The social demands for more sustainable plant production forms have been providing a greater exchange of knowledge between the academy and traditional communities, aiming to construct management techniques less harmful to the environment and people.In this context, we aim with this thesis to evaluate the presence of aphid-tending-ants in agrosystems, through two approaches, one ecological and one ethnobiological.The first thesis chapter corresponds to the ecological approach, where we tested the presence of the aphid-tending-ants in the host plant productivity. We conducted mesocosm experiment in the period of July to October of 2013, where we verified that the ecological effects of the presence of the aphid-tending-ants in the host plant vary depending on the ecological context in which the ant-aphid interaction is inserted.In the second thesis chapter, which corresponds to the ethnobiology approach we aimed to access the ethnoknowledge of the countryside communities related to their horticultural practices, and from their point of view, what is the role of ants in the horticultural environments. We conducted the study in July of 2015 in the municipality of Santa Rita de Caldas – MG. As results, we drew an ethnographic profile of the communities, where the women are responsible to the vegetable-garden management and guardian of the traditional knowledge, we also verified the importance of the local mediator for the survey success. We observed that the communities have a wide knowledge of plant cultivated, their pests and the methods to control them, mainly by alternative methods, although the use of commercial pesticides still is frequent. About the ants from the point of view of communities they are only vegetable-gardens pests and their diversity and behaviors are restricted only to ethnospecies which cause visible damages to the families and beyond that that the ant-aphid interaction is little known and apparently did not affect the vegetable-gardens studied.In the last chapter, we construct a booklet which will be distributed to the communities studied, where we present the benefits of the horticultural practices for the food security of the families, some alternative methods to control vegetable pests, and finally, we present how ants can be beneficial in the horticultural environments to ensure a better productivity.