Crop domestication is a balancing act: Some ants are still trying to get it right
Friday, September 2, 2016 - 12:01
in Biology & Nature
Skinny lines of ants snake through the rainforest carrying leaves and flowers above their heads—fertilizer for industrial-scale, underground fungus farms. Soon after the dinosaur extinctions 60 million years ago, the ancestors of leaf-cutter ants swapped a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for a bucolic existence on small-scale subsistence farms. A new study at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama revealed that living relatives of these earliest fungus-farming ants still have not domesticated their crop, a challenge also faced by early human farmers.