Ecological Surgery Part 2 - Into the Undergrowth

Wow, it has been an entire year since I wrote the last blog. And what a year of contrasts - there have been the highest highs (with family and work) and the lowest lows (markedly my health took a bit of a hit over the winter of 2024/2025).

This year, the third year of my PhD, has been the most varied and enjoyable but also stressful of the experience so far. I have been rediscovering statistics (after a 10 year hiatus with it), learning about DNA extraction and amplicon sequencing for the first time, spending even more hours staring at ant mounds (this year in the persistent heat rather than the persistent rain) and experiencing wonderful (and fortunate) opportunities such as sitting on an expert panel at the European Commission in Brussels to talk about the importance of tackling pollinator decline to the newly formed citizens assembly. 

Figure 1: At the Young Citizen's Assembly on Pollinators. The first of its kind for environmental policy-making in the EU.

The stress has come from a combination of poor health, self-doubt and the looming final year. Luckily, I have great supervisors who are supportive and compassionate and who insist that a PhD is a marathon, not a sprint (Robinson, 2023) and so now at the end of my 3^rd year, after approaching work and life a bit more sensibly, I feel in a good physical and mental position to take on this final stretch. In fact, I intend to approach it gleefully, as advised by my good friend Jo Peacock. PhDs are challenging and can be stressful, but they are also a privilege and a joy – or at least they should be – and I don’t want to wish it away (at least not yet, watch this space). With the final year approaching, I thought now would be a good time to provide an update on the translocation research we began back in 2023.

To remind you of where we left off, in 2024, we moved ant mounds and artificial mounds (soil and turf from the same donor site as the ants) from Lochore Meadows in Fife to the Bumblebee Meadow at RSPB Loch Leven in Kinross. It is worth noting that I also completed this same translocation at another site, in Lincolnshire at Belton House: moving mounds and artificial mounds from a highly ant-populated part of the estate to a more intensively managed part of the estate.

2025 was the year we examined the consequences of our actions. In ecological terms, a year is no time at all. Through a human lens, ecology is slow, but PhDs are fast and this limits our ability to conduct long-term or even medium-term studies. Alas, we must cross our fingers and hope that the ants have been busy enough to show us something interesting about their role in grassland restoration (however big or small that may be). So, from May to June, I busily collected soil samples, counted plants and flowers, examined bare soil and took the temperatures of mounds, artificial mounds and the control plots. I also counted and identified the invertebrates visiting the mounds and observed their behaviours. We want to know – do introduced native yellow meadow ant (Lasius flavus) ant mounds provide resources to pollinators in grasslands undergoing restoration? Do they attract increased pollinator interaction because of these resources? And how do they affect soil microbial assemblages (primarily bacterial and fungal)?

Pollinators require a whole host of resources – just like all living beings. They need nectar (a carbohydrate) for energy, they need pollen for protein, they need nesting habitat, they often need materials for building and they need suitable conditions for warming up – especially in early spring when the season is coldest. Ant hills, specifically yellow meadow ant hills have a lot of potential. Anecdotally, they often have bare soil exposed on them due to ant-building activity, they have a warm south-facing aspect and they are frequently just covered in flowers (at the right time of year). They create a unique niche within the grassland habitat and are already considered a species that is beneficial to biodiversity overall within this landscape (King, 2020; Lenoir, 2009). They are also understood to affect soil microbial assemblages (Boots et al., 2012). What we don’t know, is how the engineering of these ants affects the restoration process and indeed if they are beneficial for restoration.

Figure 2: A yellow meadow ant mound covered in heath bedstraw flowers.

We have now collected all the data for this particular project and in late summer, we extracted the DNA from the soils so that we might learn which soil bacteria and fungi now exist in the meadow after the introduction of the ants. This will shine a light on some of the crucial soil processes the ants may be affecting. Analysis has now begun and we are all curious to see what, if anything, has happened in this short window of 15 months since translocation. Let me tell you though, that learning about DNA extraction (the process of extracting DNA from soil - by physically and chemically blowing up biological matter) and amplicon sequencing and barcoding (the process of isolating the specific kind of DNA you want and adding little barcode identifiers to each of those little bits of DNA) is like learning how magic works. It absolutely blew my mind and my soil supervisor, Tim Goodall, deserves a medal for his patience in answering all my questions and his hard work in helping us get through 242 soil samples.

Figure 3: Putting the samples into the sequencer at UKCEH Wallingford.

But why all this? Well, I explained much of this in my previous blog. But, within all the aforementioned conservation and restoration reasons is the core motivation - all of this is fascinating because actually the small stuff really, really matters and we must pay attention to it if we want to be truly successful in our efforts to protect and restore our natural world (Wilson, 1987).

The results of this study will start to materialise in early to mid 2026 and I look forward to providing more of an update then and perhaps some interesting findings. Until then, I am happy to say that so far the translocation has been a success. Last year, only a few months after the translocation, we witnessed flying ants on the mounds, a sign that the colonies were productive enough to make these more resource-heavy ants. This year, despite a challenging year of drought and heat (and mole disturbance), all of the colonies are still active and busy making the next generations of workers.

Figure 4: Flying ants on translocated ant hills in 2024.

As the busy field and lab season comes to an end for me this year and I approach the season of analyses, writing and conferences – I’d like to thank my supervisors Elva Robinson, Claire Carvell, Tim Goodall and Carl Hawke for their continued support, to the RSPB, the Fife Coast and Countryside Trust and National Trust for their collaboration and crucially, the John Lewis Partnership Foundation for funding this research and to whom I am inexpressibly grateful.

Boots, B., Keith, A.M., Niechoj, R., Breen, J., Schmidt, O., Clipson, N., 2012. Unique soil microbial assemblages associated with grassland ant species with different nesting and foraging strategies. Pedobiologia 55, 33–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pedobi.2011.10.004

King, T.J., 2020. THE PERSISTENCE OF Lasius flavus ANT-HILLS AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON BIODIVERSITY IN GRASSLANDS. Br. J. Entomol. Nat. Hist. 33.

Lenoir, L., 2009. Effects of ants on plant diversity in semi-natural grasslands. Arthropod-Plant Interact. 3, 163–172. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11829-009-9066-7

Wilson, E.O., 1987. The Little Things That Run the world* (The Importance and Conservation of Invertebrates). Conserv. Biol. 1, 344–346. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.1987.tb00055.x