🌟 How the Asteroid That Killed Dinosaurs Turned Ants Into Farmers 🌟

🌟 Key Points: 🌟
- A scientific study illustrates how the dinosaur extinction led to the flourishing of fungi and the evolution of fungus-farming ants 66 million years ago.
- This early form of agriculture predated human agricultural practices and has since evolved into complex mutualistic relationships, which are now being studied for their potential in biotechnology.

🌟 The Meteor Impact and Fungal Spread: 🌟
- The meteor strike that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago created conditions favorable to the spread of fungi that feed on organic matter.
- The low-light environment caused by the impact provided the perfect opportunity for the ancestor of a group of ants to start cultivating these microorganisms.

🌟 Fungal Strains and Genetic Insights: 🌟
- The study provides the smallest margin of error to date for the emergence of these fungal strains, which were previously thought to be more recent.
- Researchers analyzed ultraconserved elements (UCEs) of the genomes of 475 fungal species cultivated by ants and collected from different parts of the Americas.
- This method established the near-simultaneous emergence of two distinct fungal lineages from the same ancestor of today’s leafcutter ants (Attini) 66 million years ago.

🌟 Mutualism and Agricultural Origins: 🌟
- Specialists argue that the beginning of this relationship defines the emergence of agriculture, tens of millions of years before humans began domesticating plants.
- The study also revealed the emergence of an ancestor of coral fungi, a second group that began to be cultivated by ants 21 million years ago.

🌟 Nutritional Mutualism and Fungal Adaptation: 🌟
- The results support the hypothesis that fungi had already undergone pre-adaptation before being cultivated by ants.
- The meteor impact may have turned this relationship into an obligatory mutualism, where fungi depend on ants for food and reproduction, and ants depend exclusively on fungi as a food source.
- Today, four different groups of ants cultivate four types of fungus, sometimes altering the growth of the cultivated product to provide certain nutrients.

🌟 Agricultural Evolution and Biotechnological Potential: 🌟
- Fungus-farming ants experienced a second selective pressure with the expansion of the Cerrado savanna-like biome 27 million years ago, leading to the origin of today’s leafcutter ants.
- This event also favored the diversification of fungi, which became more efficient at producing food for the ants and decomposing organic matter.
- The enzymes produced by fungi cultivated by ants are now being studied for their biotechnological potential to degrade organic matter and other materials, including plastics.

📚 Reference: 📚
- “The coevolution of fungus-ant agriculture” by Ted R. Schultz, Jeffrey Sosa-Calvo, Matthew P. Kweskin, Michael W. Lloyd, Bryn Dentinger, Pepijn W. Kooij, Else C. Vellinga, Stephen A. Rehner, Andre Rodrigues, Quimi V. Montoya, Hermógenes Fernández-Marín, Ana Ješovnik, Tuula Niskanen, Kare Liimatainen, Caio A. Leal-Dutra, Scott E. Solomon, Nicole M. Gerardo, Cameron R. Currie, Mauricio Bacci Jr., Heraldo L. Vasconcelos, Christian Rabeling, Brant C. Faircloth, and Vinson P. Doyle, 3 October 2024, Science.
- DOI: 10.1126/science.adn7179

#Dinosaurs #Asteroid #Ants #Fungi #Agriculture #Evolution #Biotechnology #Mutualism #Science #Research #FungusFarming #LeafcutterAnts #Prehistoric #Biodiversity #Ecology
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