Date: September 2, 2016
Source: Smithsonian Tropical
Research Institute
Skinny lines of ants snake
through the rainforest carrying leaves and flowers above their heads --
fertilizer for industrial-scale, underground fungus farms. Soon after the
dinosaur extinctions 60 million years ago, the ancestors of leaf-cutter ants
swapped a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for a bucolic existence on small-scale
subsistence farms. A new study at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
(STRI) in Panama revealed that living relatives of these earliest
fungus-farming ants still have not domesticated their crop, a challenge also
faced by early human farmers.
Modern leaf-cutter ants can not
live without their fungus and the fungus can not live without the ants -- in
fact, young queens carry a bit from the nests where they were born when they
fly out to establish a new nest. The fungus, in turn, does not waste
energy-producing spores to reproduce itself.
"For this sort of tight
mutual relationship to develop, the interests of the ants and the fungi have to
be completely aligned, like when business partners agree on all the terms in a
contract," said Bill Wcislo, deputy director at the STRI and co-author of
the new publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences. "We found that the selfish interests of more primitive ancestors
of leaf-cutting ants are still not in line with the selfish interests of their
fungal partner, so complete domestication hasn't really happened yet."
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