André Rodrigues / UNESPNutritive vesicles produced by fungi, magnified a thousand timesAndré Rodrigues / UNESP
Tens of millions of years before the agricultural revolution that transformed human society, other animals were already planting gardens. Ants were cultivating fungus some 66 million years ago. The asteroid that hit Earth and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs may also have stimulated an increase in fungi that fed on organic matter. “Fungi were not an essential part of the ants’ nutrition,” André Rodrigues, a biologist from São Paulo State University (UNESP), Rio Claro campus, told Agência FAPESP. “The pressure caused by the asteroid’s impact may have caused this relationship to become an obligate mutualism, in which the fungi began to rely on the ants in order to feed and reproduce, while the ants relied exclusively on the fungi as a food source.” The event was dated by analyzing the genomes of 475 fungal species cultivated by ants and collected from across the Americas (Agência FAPESP and Science, October 3).
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