Mature seeds have an attached structure known as an “elaiosome,” which is really just a fancy word for a tasty snack. The ants will drag seeds down into their nests, where they will feed the elaiosome to their larvae and discard the seed intact. This is beneficial for both the ants, who get a nutrient dense meal, and the seeds, who essentially get planted in the relative safety and rich soil of an ant nest’s compost pile.
Seeds and ants are not the only way trout lilies spread, though. Beneath each plant, below ground, is a small food-storage structure similar to a bulb called a corm. These white structures are said to have inspired the trout lily’s other common name, dog toothed violet, because of their supposed resemblance to the fang of a dog. These corms will extend root-like structures called “stolons” into the surrounding soil, at the end of the stolons a bud called a “dropper” will form. Droppers can be anywhere from deep in the soil below the parent corm, to just threading along under leaf litter at the soil surface. They will eventually grow into new, genetically identical corms to the parent and the stolon will wither away. Over time, this propagation method forms a massive clonal colony of trout lilies.
Botanists still disagree on whether these clonal plants ever grow two leaves and flower, or if they just stay single leaf clones, leaving only the plants grown via seed to flower. And it takes baby trout lilies an average of seven years to reach sexual maturity and be able to flower, so no matter how they reproduce, every plant spends its first several years as a single leaf and most colonies are composed mostly of the non-flowering single-leaf plants.