Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History researchers state that this evolutionary partnership became stronger 27 million years ago, and exists even today.
A yeast-farming worker of the fungus-farming ant species Cyphomyrmex cf. rimosus, collected in Mindo, Ecuador, in 2011, on its fungus garden.A new surprising study has discovered that ants began farming fungi around 66 million years ago, shortly after a devastating asteroid impact that killed dinosaurs.
“Ants have been practicing agriculture and fungus farming for much longer than humans have existed,” said Ted Schultz, entomologist and the museum’s curator of ants and the lead author of the new paper. Leafcutter ants are just one example of the many ant species that have developed agricultural systems. Nearly 250 different species of ants in the Americas and Caribbean farm fungi, using a variety of cultivation strategies.
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