What looked like a few seeds beside an ant nest in a backyard turned out to be something stranger, and far more consequential. When 8-year-old Hugo Deans spotted several BB-sized objects under a log near an ant nest, he assumed the ants had gathered seeds. His father, Penn State entomologist Andrew Deans, recognized them as oak galls, the small plant growths made when certain wasps trigger an oak tree to build a protective structure around their larvae. That much fit with established biology. What did not fit was why ants were hauling them around. That question led researchers to a layered ecological story involving oak trees, gall wasps and ants, one that may force a rethink of a classic example from biology textbooks. “For myrmecochory, ants get a little bit of nutrition when they eat the elaiosomes, and the plants get their seeds dispersed to an enemy-free space,” Deans said, referring to the well-known process in which ants carry seeds fitted with edible appendages. “The phenomenon was first documented over 100 years ago and is …