April 11, 2017
Millions of years before humans
discovered agriculture, vast farming systems were thriving beneath the surface
of the Earth. The subterranean farms, which produced various types of fungi,
were cultivated and maintained by colonies of ants, whose descendants continue
practicing agriculture today.
By tracing the evolutionary
history of these fungus-farming ants, scientists at the Smithsonian's National
Museum of Natural History have learned about a key transition in the insects'
agricultural evolution. This transition allowed the ants to achieve higher
levels of complexity in farming, rivaling the agricultural practices of humans:
the domestication of crops that became permanently isolated from their wild
habitats and thereby grew dependent on their farmers for their evolution and
survival.
In the April 12 issue of Proceedings
of Royal Society B, scientists led by entomologist Ted Schultz, the museum's
curator of ants, report that the transition likely occurred when farming ants
began living in dry climates, where moisture-loving fungi could not survive on
their own. The finding comes from a genetic analysis that charts the
evolutionary relationships of farming and non-farming ants from wet and dry
habitats throughout the Neotropics.
About 250 species of fungus-farming ants have
been found in tropical forests, deserts and grasslands in the Americas and the
Caribbean, and these species fall into two different groups based on the level
of complexity of their farming societies: lower and higher agriculture. All
farming ants start new fungal gardens when a queen's daughter leaves her
mother's nest to go off and found her own nest, taking with her a piece of the
original colony's fungus to start the next colony's farm.
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