SCIENCE LAB SCHEME : JUNGLE LODGE

WITH ants as tenants - this plant makes an ideal landlord. On a hot, sticky day in Fiji in 2014, Guillaume Chomicki, an evolutionary biologist in England, cut a soccer-ball-size tuber with a few leafy branches.

The plant belonged to Squamellaria, a collection of species that grows on trees and is known for housing buckets of ants in what Dr. Chomicki previously showed to be a mutually beneficial relationship.

Each type of Squamellaria specializes in offering a different species of ant a nesting site that's safe from predators and torrential rains.

The ants, in return, provide nutrients in the form of their feces to the rootless plants. The ants also carry the plants' seeds to new bark crevices, allowing the next generation to flourish.

As Dr. Chomicki dissected the tuber, expecting to find a single kind of ant, he instead found two colonies of ants belonging to different species.

Different groups of ants are notoriously violent toward one another, so he was puzzled by how the species could coexist without causing the whole plant-insect enterprise to collapse.

In a paper in the journal Science, Dr. Chomicki's team shows that some of these plants serve as good landlords, creating housing for up to five colonies of different species of ants, each in its own compartment.

The botanical architecture allows the insects to coexist, creating abundance for multiple colonies.

A CT scan of a nest shows apartments with separate entrances.

The World Students Society thanks Ari Daniel.