How tiny fungus farmers made a model of sustainable agriculture.
“I know of no pursuit in which more zeal & important service can be rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture,” opined George Washington in a 1794 letter. While the prevalence of the frontier farmer has admittedly decreased since Washington’s day, agriculture itself is arguably one of humanity’s crowning achievements, laying the groundwork for the rise of civilization and allowing the human population to exponentially proliferate.
To the extent that ants are farmers, it's because they, along with a select few other species, cultivate their own food for consumption. Currently, over 200 ant species across the Western Hemisphere make forays into the jungle, driven by some deep-seated atavistic instinct that compels them to harvest plant matter, which is carried back to the nest to feed fungal crops, which are consumed in turn by the ants.
“If you’ve been carried into a dry habitat, your fate is going to match the fate of the colony you’re in. At that point, you’re bound in a relationship with those ants that you were not bound in when you were in a wet forest,” said entomologist and lead author Ted Schultz in the press release.
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