e NEWS
AGRICULTURE BY ANTS
" They are farmers,
doctors, and traffic engineers. Leaf-cutter ants have
been practicing the good life for millions of years.
They have been growing their own food for about 50
million years, which is 50 million years longer than
humans have ".
" The study of the
leaf-cutter ant may one day influence everything from
how we produce fuel, fight disease, and our thoughts
about evolution ".
The leaf-cutter ants carry
leaf pieces back to their nests made up of a spongy
garden of fungus. They carefully tend to this fungus
garden which supplies the ant colony with their
primary source of food. It is interesting that each
species of ants tends to its own distinctive species
of fungus which cannot survive outside of these ants'
nests.
In the 1990s, scientists
thought that this relationship was a pretty
straightforward case of symbiosis, where ants nourish
fungi which in turn nourishes them. Further studies
indicate that the relationship is far more
complicated.
Scientists discovered that
the waxy, white residue on their carapace were
antibiotic-producing bacteria that helped to suppress
the parasitic mold that attacks their fungus garden.
For millions of years, ants have been using some of
the bacteria we "discovered" to create
disease-fighting antibiotics. They have also
mysteriously managed to avoid the problem of
antibiotic resistance, a problem that plaques
monoculture cultivation.
This complex relationship
also involves another newly discovered organism - a
yeast that lives on the ant body, which serves as food
sources for the antibiotic-producing bacteria; and a
newly-discovered nitrogen-fixing bacteria living in
the fungus garden.
At least 8 different
species of leaf-cutter ants typically live with
bacteria that capture nitrogen from the air and turn
it into a form that ants can use. These bacteria
helpers might explain how the ants feed up to 8
million workers in a single colony just by harvesting
bits of nitrogen-poor leaves and letting a fungus grow
on them.
Full article in: No Leaf Unturned, What Do They
Know That We Don't?
in GROW, Fall 2009.
http://www.cals.wisc.edu/grow
More
information in:
Classic View of Leaf-Cutter Ants Overlooked
Nitrogen-Fixing Partner.
http://www.sciencenews.org
Dec.19, Vol. 176 #13 (p.8) 2009.
