Ants have been farmers for tens of millions of years and successfully solved a riddle that we humans have yet to. A new study by researchers at the University of Copenhagen reports that ants are pros at cultivating climate-resilient crops.
Fungus-farming ants are an insect lineage that relies on farmed fungus for their survival. In return for tending to their fungal crops—protecting them against pests and pathogens, providing them with stable growth conditions in underground nests, and provisioning them with nutritional ‘fertilizers’—the ants gain a stable food supply.
These fungus farming systems are an expression of striking collective organization honed over 60 million years of fungus crop domestication. The farming systems of humans thus pale in comparison, since they emerged only ca. 10,000 years ago.
A new study from the University of Copenhagen, and funded by an ERC Starting Grant, demonstrates that these ants might be one up on us as far as farming skills go. Long ago, they managed to appear to have overcome key domestication challenges that we have yet to solve.
Continue reading at University of Copenhagen.
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