image: This is an aerial photograph showing the surales mounds. view more
Credit: Delphine Renard
Earthworms are the engineers behind the 75,000 km2, densely packed, regularly spaced, and mound-patterned landscapes, called surales, in the South American seasonal tropical wetlands, according to a study published May 11, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Anne Zangerlé from Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, Delphine Renard from McGill University, Canada, and colleagues.
A seasonal wetland in Colombia and Venezuela is dotted with mounds that can reach as large as 2 meters tall and 5 meters across. However, despite this unusual vegetation pattern, the ecology of the mounds is little known, and some researchers have proposed that these patterned arrays result from erosion. The authors of this study investigated the origin and extent of the surales landscapes by comparing earthworms and soil properties at sites with and without mounds, as well as analyzing aerial images obtained from drones and Google Earth.
The researchers found that the mounds were dominated by the earthworm Andiorrhinus sp., which is also the largest earthworm in the study area at lengths up to 1 m. This earthworm feeds in shallowly flooded soil and deposits casts to build a small "tower" of dry habitat, where it breathes. The tower may eventually become a mound surrounded by a moat. The researchers propose that as neighboring mounds grow, they fill the intervening basins and form larger mounds, creating the surales pattern. By building mounds in this seasonal wetland, these worms "engineer" the ecosystem and create dry habitat also used by plants and other earthworms. The authors suggest that further research is needed to investigate the microtopography of the floodplains where surales occur, as well as whether worm behavior has driven the development of similarly patterned landscapes elsewhere in the tropics.
Anne Zangerlé adds: "We were really impressed not only by the regularity in the size and spacing of mounds in surales landscapes, but also by their spatial extent. We showed that they occur throughout much of the Orinoco Llanos, in both Colombia and Venezuela, but they have hardly been noticed by ecologists. We were surprised to find that the main driver of these earth-mound landscapes appears to be a single very large earthworm species."
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In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper: http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0154269
Citation: Zangerlé A, Renard D, Iriarte J, Suarez Jimenez LE, Adame Montoya KL, Juilleret J, et al. (2016) The Surales, Self-Organized Earth-Mound Landscapes Made by Earthworms in a Seasonal Tropical Wetland. PLoS ONE 11(5): e0154269. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0154269
Funding: Funding for field missions was supported by a grant to Doyle McKey from the Institut Universitaire de France, http://www.iufrance.fr/. Additional funding was supplied by a grant to Doyle McKey from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Mission pour l'Interdisciplinarité, http://www.cnrs.fr/mi/. FNR/AFR of the CNRS; Anne Zangerlé benefited from a grant for post-doctoral study by the National Research Fund Luxembourg (FNR), co-funded under the Marie Curie Actions of the European Commission (FP7-COFUND), Grant number (4886121), http://www.fnr.lu/. Work in Colombia was supported by a grant from the program ECOS/COLCIENCIAS to Anne Zangerlé, Grant number (M101PR03F2), http://www.colciencias.gov.co/. And by a grant to Doyle McKey from the TOSCA committee ("Terre Solide, Océan, Surfaces Continentales, Atmosphère") of the CNES (French National Center for Space Research). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Journal
PLOS ONE