Discover the astonishing story of how ants have been practicing agriculture and fungus farming for millions of years – long before humans even existed! Explore how a global mass extinction event triggered by an asteroid impact 66 million years ago actually paved the way for ants to develop their own sophisticated farming practices. Learn about the fascinating evolutionary timeline of this ancient partnership between ants and fungi, and how it can provide valuable insights for modern agricultural practices. Ants, Fungi, Mass Extinction
Ants: The Original Farmers
Agriculture is a simple form of farming, first invented thousands o years ago by humans. A new study is published in this month’s issue of Science, and it details the long and full history ants have as farmers; more than 66 million years good at it.
The impact of a huge asteroid that hit our planet 66 million years ago resulting in a global mass extinction which saw off the last of the dinosaurs, was actually incredibly good news for one unlikely group: the fungi. Ants of the future saw an opportunity to capitalize on this glut of fungi, and started farming the fungus, through co-evolution maintaining what is presently one of the oldest agricultural deals going. The study deployed genetic data from over 400 ant and fungal species to track the roots of this most ancient form of farming by ants back to the era of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction.
Higher Agriculture’s Rise to Prominence
Although ants have been cultivating fungi for tens of millions of years, the researchers said it took another roughly 40 million years for them to achieve “higher agriculture” — the top level in terms of complexity in ant farming. This breakthrough was around 27 million years ago with the rapidly cooling climate that led large tropical forests to fragment into drier woody savannas and grasslands.
By migrating their fungal cultivars from the wet forests into these drier woods, the fungi lost its ability to live outside of nests and became pests of ant-trees. The isolation from their wild ancestral populations paved the way for the more advanced agricultural system of today’s leafcutter ants to then evolve, where the ants cut fresh vegetation that feeds their fungi, which provide food for the ants. Showing Millions in numbers, these very efficient and Complicated Colonies exhibit the incredible agricultural skill these small creatures have.
The Ant Farmers within us — Lessons Learned
The evolutionary success of ant agriculture holds important lessons for modern challenges in farming — from soil degradation and pest control to climate change. I mean, they have been experiencing sustainable agriculture for tens of millions of years so what do the single-handedly most important being that ever existed know?
Learning about how the complex interplay between ants and their fungal cultivars may help pave the way for new approaches to boost crops, soil fertility, and sustainable agriculture systems. And as Ted Schultz — an entomologist and the lead author of this study — said so beautifully, “Ants have been cultivating their gardens far longer than humans. If these ants have been that good at growing food over 66 million years, there´s probably something we could learn from them.