The coevolution of fungus-ant agriculture
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-4-2024
Abstract
Fungus-farming ants cultivate multiple lineages of fungi for food, but, because fungal cultivar relationships are largely unresolved, the history of fungus-ant coevolution remains poorly known. We designed probes targeting >2000 gene regions to generate a dated evolutionary tree for 475 fungi and combined it with a similarly generated tree for 276 ants. We found that fungus-ant agriculture originated ~66 million years ago when the end-of-Cretaceous asteroid impact temporarily interrupted photosynthesis, causing global mass extinctions but favoring the proliferation of fungi. Subsequently, ~27 million years ago, one ancestral fungal cultivar population became domesticated, i.e., obligately mutualistic, when seasonally dry habitats expanded in South America, likely isolating the cultivar population from its free-living, wet forest–dwelling conspecifics. By revealing these and other major transitions in fungus-ant coevolution, our results clarify the historical processes that shaped a model system for nonhuman agriculture.
Publication Source (Journal or Book title)
Science
First Page
105
Last Page
109
Recommended Citation
Schultz, T., Sosa-Calvo, J., Kweskin, M., Lloyd, M., Dentinger, B., Kooij, P., Vellinga, E., Rehner, S., Rodrigues, A., Montoya, Q., Fernández-Marín, H., Ješovnik, A., Niskanen, T., Liimatainen, K., Leal-Dutra, C., Solomon, S., Gerardo, N., Currie, C., Bacci, M., Vasconcelos, H., Rabeling, C., Faircloth, B., & Doyle, V. (2024). The coevolution of fungus-ant agriculture. Science, 386 (6717), 105-109. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adn7179