Natures wonders: Ants farm fungus for food (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 11, 2014, 19:04 (3633 days ago) @ David Turell

"A joint effort by researchers at the Universities of Copenhagen and Lund has produced a reconstruction of how fungus-growing ants have stepwise improved their clonal crops into a robust and superbly efficient farming system. The results, published today in the journal Nature Communications, show that reliable delivery of some enzymes and vital amino acids in the fungal food explains that the ant farmers have lost the ability to produce these compounds themselves.-"Leaf-cutting ants use a broad range of fungal enzymes to degrade harvested leaf fragments in what appears to be an optimal joint venture with sophisticated division of labor. The fungus produces clusters of inflated food packages for the ants. These symbiotic organs provide carbohydrates, lipids, fungal enzymes and vital amino acids and satisfy all the nutritious needs of the ant farmers and of their brood, which also eat garden-fungus. These foodpackage organs evolved ca. 20 million years ago and represented an innovation that allowed today's leaf-cutting ants to evolve truly large-scale farms. Fungus-growing ants became farmers ca. 50 million years ago, but the first 30 million years they only had small-scale subsistence farms in which they used plant debris to make tiny fungus gardens grow. However, that suddenly changed and from then on developments accelerated.-"Although it took ages of slow natural selection, today's ant farms are ca. 100,000 times larger than those of the first ancestors that invented farming," says Henrik De Fine Licht -the first and corresponding author."-"This is comparable to what most modern human agricultural systems have achieved, and it is striking that the scale of environmental effects appears to have increased to the same degree. Not like human farming that uses enormous amounts of water, fertilizer and pesticides, but for the ants the key resource is access to fresh leaves. Their most advanced societies became aggressive herbivores that cause massive defoliation damage in natural ecosystems and human farmland in Latin America."-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141210131307.htm