The Astonishing World of Ant-plant Symbioses
Date/Time
Monday, March 28, 2016
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Location
Roanoke Council of Garden Clubs
Categories
This presentation will offer an overview of the interactions between two of the world’s most dominant terrestrial groups — flowering plants and ants. Complex ant-plant interactions involving thousands of species have evolved across the globe ranging from herbivory to highly sophisticated defensive and dispersal mutualisms. One such remarkable interaction, known as myrmecochory, occurs in the temperate forests of eastern North America and involves a number of familiar spring flowers such as trilliums and violets.
Kal Ivanov is the assistant curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the Virginia Museum of Natural History. He holds a Master’s degree in entomology from Sofia University (Bulgaria) and a Ph.D. in ecology from Cleveland State University. He has worked as a research biologist (Institute of Zoology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences), collections assistant (Cleveland Museum of Natural History), and a zoology/ecology lecturer (John Carrol University, Cleveland State University).
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