Produced by: Mohsin Shaikh
Long before humans started agriculture, ants were cultivating fungi. New research shows ants began farming fungi 66 million years ago, after an asteroid wiped out dinosaurs and reshaped Earth’s ecosystems.
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Ants formed a unique relationship with fungi, relying on them as a food source. This co-evolution has shaped the biology of both ants and fungi, helping them thrive through millions of years.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The global mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs brought ants and fungi together. Decaying plant matter became a food source for fungi, and ants began cultivating them soon after.
Researchers used cutting-edge DNA sequencing techniques to uncover how ants began farming fungi. LSU professors Vinson P. Doyle and Brant C. Faircloth contributed to the study by developing molecular methods to capture fungal and ant genetic data.
The ants’ ability to farm fungi has allowed them to cultivate a steady food supply, similar to human agriculture, providing valuable insights into how domestication evolves across species.
Credit: Alex Wild/University of Texas
Ants’ farming of fungi mirrors human domestication of plants. The more examples of domestication across different species, the better scientists can understand how it evolves and affects genomes.
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Doyle and his team developed a method to extract DNA from small fungal fragments carried by ants, enabling scientists to trace the evolutionary relationship between ants and their fungal cultivars.
The study, published in Science, reveals that ants mastered agriculture long before humans, showing how an ancient partnership between ants and fungi shaped life on Earth.