Ants invented agriculture 65 million years ago. A study published in the journal Science demonstrates that it was after the fall of the asteroid which precipitated the end of the dinosaurs that ants began to cultivate mushrooms and domesticate them.
They are called the mushroom antss or leaf-cutter ants. You may have seen them carrying recently cut pieces of leaves or flowers, much larger than themselves, on their backs to their anthill. But it is not for their personal consumption.
These plant debris are intended for the mushrooms that they cultivate to feed their colony and especially to feed their larvae. This is called a “mutually beneficial symbiosis”, with the ants growing mushrooms to ensure their survival and that of their offspring and the mushrooms subsisting on the food provided by the ants. It is the oldest known form of agriculture. But scientists were looking to understand how and when ants began cultivating mushrooms.
65 million years ago, the cataclysm that changed everything
Thanks to very in-depth cross-genetic studies, a team of international entomologist and mycologist researchers succeeded, by deciphering the genome of 475 species of mushrooms and 547 species of ants, in going back in time and the phylogenetic tree of this co- evolution between ants and fungi.
The result of their study, which has just been published in the journal Science, resulted in 65 million years, just after the fall of the giant asteroid on the Yucatan Peninsula. Fall which caused the last great extinction of life and the disappearance of the dinosaurs. And this is no coincidence, because the planetary cataclysm caused by the fall of this giant asteroid caused fires and clouds of oil and sulfur smoke which darkened the earth and wiped out animals and plants. A scorched earth on which nothing grows except mushrooms.
Outstanding cultivators
According to the entomologist Ted Schulz of Smithsonian Instituteone of the authors of this study, antsultra-resistant, must have already started a symbiotic relationship with the mushrooms before the cataclysm. But this somehow forced them, in order to survive, to invent agriculture in a few million years, and even gardening.
Because these exceptional cultivators measuring only a few millimeters maintain, clean and cultivate these mycelia which provide them not only with the proteins, but also with the enzymes they lack. The fungi, in return, benefit from the heat and humidity of the anthill, but also from the antibiotic bacteria produced by the agricultural ants. Who says better!
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