Natures wonders: ants and other insects farm (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, April 24, 2020, 23:24 (1672 days ago) @ David Turell

This has been done for millions of years before we started about 12,000 years ago:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/insects-ants-extreme-farming-methods-offer-good-bad...

"To picture this farm, imagine some dark blobs dangling high up in a tree.

"Each blob can reach “about soccer ball size,” says evolutionary biologist Guillaume Chomicki of Durham University in England. From this bulbous base, a Squamellaria plant eventually sprouts leafy shoots and hangs, slumping sideways or upside down, from its host tree’s branches. In Fiji, one of the local names for the plant translates as “testicle of the trees.”

"Some Squamellaria species grow in clusters and teem with fiercely protective ants. As a young seedling blob plumps up, jelly bean–shaped bubbles form inside, reachable only through ant-sized doorways. As soon as a young plant cracks open its first door to daylight, “ant workers start to enter and defecate inside the seedling to fertilize it,” Chomicki says.

"The idea that ants tend these plants as farmers gave Chomicki one of those surprise-left-turn moments in science. In a string of papers published since 2016, he and colleagues share evidence for the idea that the Philidris nagasau ants may be the first known animals other than humans to farm plants. (The other known insect farmers cultivate fungi.)

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'Until Chomicki’s work, biologists accepted only three groups of fungus-farming insects as achieving the essentials of full agriculture and so rivaling human efforts. Select types of beetles, termites and ants each tamed different fungi, tending their much-needed food crop from sowing to harvest.

"Humans didn’t farm any food before roughly 12,000 years ago as far as we know. Insects started much earlier. Even leaf-cutter ants, relative newcomers to farming, have been growing their specialized crops for about 15 million years.

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"The fungus farms of leaf-cutter Atta ants and their close relatives invite comparisons with human farms. Both kinds of farmers do things that look unsustainable, such as growing single crops at a vast scale and applying pesticides. Yet the ants have managed to persist for millions of years.

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"Plenty of other creatures — social amoebas, a marsh snail, a damselfish, for instance — have evolved ways to encourage food to appear where and when they want it. Impressive as those feats are, plenty of scientists don’t consider those lifestyles full-on agriculture.

"Several thousand species of the group called ambrosia beetles make up the biggest of the three insect groups that humans deign to call true farmers... Fungus farming has evolved independently at least 11 times among these beetles, says forest entomologist Jiri Hulcr of the University of Florida in Gainesville. A few ambrosia species tunneling into trees bring along a fungus that can digest wood’s tougher molecules. Most ambrosia fungal farms, though, are just scavenging nutrients in the dying tree. Still, the fungus gets nutrients, then the beetles eat the fungus."

Comment: The rest of this enormous review article takes up individual examples and is worth reading. As usual I favor help from God in these complex instinctual behaviors.