Ants have known 'cultivation' since ... 60 million years ago

According to Independent, research conducted by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute shows that ants have gradually abandoned the prey-picking model after the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The antiti called Antiti appeared in South America, researchers said they had begun "cultivation" by raising and harvesting mushrooms. After studying the genome of ants, they concluded that this process began about 55-60 million years ago.

About 25 million years ago, ants were cultivating mushrooms to harvest seeds containing protein as food. Nutrition from this food helped to increase the size of ants, and about 15 million years ago, ants cut leaves. This leaf-cut ants cut the leaves into small pieces, put them underground to feed mushrooms.

Ants have known to raise mushrooms from tens of millions of years ago.

This model also led to new evolution in both fungal and ant species. The fungus that ants cut leaves does not produce enzymes for digesting wood, so they can only absorb the substances from the leaves that ants bring. Therefore, fungi also only produce proteins that are suitable for food inputs. As a result, ants then produce only enzymes that consume this protein.

Compared to ants, humans have only known agriculture from about 10,000 years ago. The authors of the study said that ants have "created a high society with industrial farming model ".

"Cultivation has created a human society in just a few thousand years, in which human beings continually improve crop varieties that bring higher yields and higher quality. This industrial farming scale only exists. in two species are ants cultivating mushrooms and termites.

However, the agricultural activity of these two species depends on natural selection and thus changes much more slowly than humans. These species use the underground method of growing, depending on the decomposition process of the fungus instead of the photosynthesis process as with most plants grown ".

The appearance of leaf-cutting ants leads to a model of mushroom culture on the ground.

It is worth mentioning that the agricultural development process of ants has many similarities with humans. Initially, the feed types yielded less nutritional efficiency than the natural food obtained by hunting, so the ants were also weaker. It is similar to humans: In the early period of shifting from hunting - gathering to farming, those who ate farmed food were often smaller and weaker. Only after the development of agriculture, cultivated food species no longer hybridize with natural food, the quality of food is improved.