Around 50 million days ago , some ants in South America adjudicate to give up the previous hunter - gatherer routine and adjudicate their hand at a new way of feeding themselves . They began tending fungi , fecundate their garden with constitutional litter they get hold so it would grow , and then nibbling nutritious bits off their crop . Long before world started doing it or even came on to the scene , these ant devise agriculture .
One of these fungus - agriculture ants isApterostigma megacephala , which was described and nominate based on just four solitary specimens discover scatter around the Amazon in 1999 . class of look failed to sour up more , until a colony was discovered right under scientist ’ noses along a avail route at a zoological garden . Digging into the ant ’ DNA turned up something interesting : The metal money is the exclusive subsister of a line of descent that split off from the other land ants around 39 million years ago . look at their fungal crops , researchersfoundsomething even more surprising . The insects are , a squad led by entomologistTed Schultzsays , “ The ant equivalent of … Neanderthals domesticate GMO crop . ”
Today , there more than 250 metal money of fungus - farming emmet , all feel in the Americas and grouped into the tribeAttini . Unlike their human counterpart , who can scale their farming operations up and down or switch crops in and out , these farmer ants are more or less locked intotwo groupswith certain agency of doing thing . The “ lower - attine ” emmet tame small gardens using fungus kingdom that can also live on their own in the natural state . Like the naive Fannie Merritt Farmer ant ancestor , they fertilize their crops with drained matter they discover lying around . The “ higher - attine ” pismire are more advanced . They hold up in large , more complex colonies and feed their fungal harvest — which are unfeignedly domesticise and unable to live apart from the ants — with live , fresh - issue plant piece that they reap .
Apterostigma megacephaladoesn’t appear to playact by these formula , and is the first and only lower - attine ant that ’s been found grow a higher - attine fungus . It cultivates a highly domesticated fungus that ’s much immature than itself and only originated in the garden of higher - attine folio - cutter emmet less than 10 million years ago .
Switching from one kind of fungus to another is rare for these farmers , because each ant metal money is compatible only with specific fungi due to biological constraints . Some ants , for example , rely on their fungal crops for certain amino acids that they ’re ineffectual to acquire themselves , and ca n’t grow fungi that do n’t make these acids . Other ant carry bacteria that control harmful fungi and observe the wellness of their garden , without which their fungous harvest would n’t come through . In experiments where ants have been given a new fungus to grow , both the harvest and the sodbuster quickly die because of their repugnance .
So how did the primitiveApterostigma megacephalafarmers get a wait of a relatively new , domesticated fungus and make it work ? Schultz is n’t certain yet , but his team mean that one of the farming ant ’ coarse antecedent may have been able to cultivate a variety of fungi without any constraint , andA. megacephala ’s branch of the kinsfolk Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree might have maintained that tractability while the other emmet did n’t . instead , after its split from the rest of the farmers , A. megacephalamay have evolve some biological feature that “ pre - altered ” it to mould with this particular fungus , allowing the species to make the switch from some other crop .
To get to the bottom of this closed book , moreA. megacephalanests will require to be intimately studied and compared to their distant cousins . as luck would have it , the researcher say , the recent discovery of newA. megacephalacolonies in Brazil will make this potential .
