Professor Alain Dejean and his team are carrying out a three-month mission in French Guyana to study more closely the behaviour of certain ants that live only in trees.
Jerome Orivel is a specialist in the area of “ant gardens”: vegetation systems perched on the branches, planted, cultivated and maintained by certain ants. Furthermore, the roots of these gardens serve as living quarters.
Some gardens are of a very particular zoological rarity in that two, sometimes three, species of ants live together without conflict.
Laurelyne Basset studies an astonishing tree that is found in tropical America. The trunk of this tree is naturally hollow and shelters the nest of a very particular ant, one that defends the tree against outside aggressors.
In exchange, the tree possesses at the base of its leaves special glands that supply the ants with the most nourishing of food.
Frogs balancing on the ends of branches, spiders socialising in their thousands, ants that like to do gardening and giant trapdoor spiders: in the “SECRETS OF THE AMERICAN JUNGLE” series (3 x 52’, ants, frogs and spiders) we visit the astonishing world of these little creatures of the equatorial forest on the north-eastern coast of the South American continent in Guyana. This forest, which has been well protected until recently, is one of the richest in the world in terms of animal diversity. Professor Bertrand Krafft guides us to the enormous nests created by a species of sociable spiders that also hunt collectively in a perfectly synchronised movement. The film also takes us on a night time excursion to observe the Leblondi trapdoor spiders, the biggest of their kind in the world. We also discover the amblipyge, one of the most frightening creatures in Guyana.
The second part is about the Kunawalu tree frog and the metronome tree frog. They live and reproduce in the branches of trees and feed their tadpoles by laying a second generation of eggs. In order to approach them at heights of 30 metres, Philippe Gaucher needed to rig about fifty trees with ropes. The film also shows the “explosive ovulation” during which thousands of frogs copulate simultaneously.
Professor Alain Dejean’s research team specialises in ants that live only in trees. Not only are these types of ants the tree’s loyal friend, protecting it against the many parasites that devour its leaves, but they also cultivate gardens of little plants in the tree branches where they live.