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Source: Insects' Extreme Farming Methods Offer us Lessons to Learn and Oddities to Avoid:
To picture this farm, imagine some dark blobs dangling high up in a tree.
Each blob can reach "about soccer ball size," says evolutionary biologist Guillaume Chomicki of Durham University in England. From this bulbous base, a Squamellaria plant eventually sprouts leafy shoots and hangs, slumping sideways or upside down, from its host tree's branches. In Fiji, one of the local names for the plant translates as "testicle of the trees."
Some Squamellaria species grow in clusters and teem with fiercely protective ants. As a young seedling blob plumps up, jelly bean–shaped bubbles form inside, reachable only through ant-sized doorways. As soon as a young plant cracks open its first door to daylight, "ant workers start to enter and defecate inside the seedling to fertilize it," Chomicki says.
The idea that ants tend these plants as farmers gave Chomicki one of those surprise-left-turn moments in science. In a string of papers published since 2016, he and colleagues share evidence for the idea that the Philidris nagasau ants may be the first known animals other than humans to farm plants. (The other known insect farmers cultivate fungi.) Chomicki's latest paper, in the Feb. 4 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reports that ants planting seeds of their blobby crop make trade-offs, going for full sun and maximizing the rewarding, sweet flowers rather than planting in the shade, where plants would have higher nitrogen.
Until Chomicki's work, biologists accepted only three groups of fungus-farming insects as achieving the essentials of full agriculture and so rivaling human efforts. Select types of beetles, termites and ants each tamed different fungi, tending their much-needed food crop from sowing to harvest.
Journal Reference
Guillaume Chomicki, Gudrun Kadereit, Susanne S. Renner, et al. Tradeoffs in the evolution of plant farming by ants [$], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1919611117)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday April 25 2020, @05:37PM (4 children)
versus
This is one of the puzzles of evolution. These ants and their fungal crops have had 60 million years to evolve. Yet they are remarkably inefficient in the processing of nutrients (a property which is shared with a lot of other life, including human digestive systems). Is there perhaps a survival disadvantage to processing nutrients too efficiently? Or perhaps plants have evolved to yield their nutrients as little as possible to this sort of fungal digestion even after death?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2020, @07:20PM
Perhaps it's similar to how some people drive a Hummer to get from point A to point B. Hopelessly inefficient but ants do it so why the fuck not?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2020, @08:49PM
There's probably a serious evolutionary advantage to being inefficient enough to participate in the ecosystem which has evolved niches around this "waste". Ecosystems are an area where the whole is exponentially greater than the parts.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2020, @11:33PM
It's likely that there is no real survival advantage (or there has not been one) to becoming more efficient, or perhaps it is simply not possible for most species during their existence. Becoming more efficient as a common result would involve a directed level of activity, none choose this, it is only by accident that a species succeeds in this level of change, most changes result in extinction. Most animals, humans included, live as hunter gatherers, doing just enough to get enough food to survive and reproduce. If outside pressures force more efficiency, it usually results in either a) species moving to smaller niches that can support them, and/or b) species die-offs. Sometimes ecological change results in more radical adaptations, usually this occurs when a combination of a and b occurs, the survivors, with a different set of genetic tools, fill the niches formerly occupied by other species or move into new ones.
(Score: 3, Informative) by captain normal on Sunday April 26 2020, @05:08AM
Ants are also hearders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43id_NRajDo [youtube.com]
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--