Ants take up farming 50 mln years ago

BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhuanet) -- Ants developed their knack for farming about 50 million years ago, scientists said.

An analysis of the DNA of farmer ants traced them back to an original ancestor -- a sort of adam ant, at least to the types that raise their own food, according to a paper published Monday in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study concurs with speculation that fungi farming arose in ants about 50 million years ago in a warmer, more humid South America.

The original ant agriculturists grew a diverse array of fungal species by collecting fresh detritus from leaf-littered forest floors to fertilize their crops, according to entomologists Ted Schultz and Sean Brady at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

In the last 25 million years ants have developed different types of farming including the well-known leaf-cutter ants.

Instead of scrounging from the forest floor, leaf-cutters tailor-make their fertilizer by cutting leaves and leaf fragments, often from living plants.

Some fungi-farming ant species have even weathered crop diseases by developing their own forms of antibiotic control.

Schultz said humans -- who developed an agriculture that is still fraught with difficulties only about 10,000 years ago -- could learn from the history of ant agriculture.

"There has been a co-evolution [between ants and the fungi they farm] that's very much like the kind of co-evolution that has taken place between humans and our cultivars," he said.

By studying the fungus-growing ants the researchers hope to learn more about the development of ant agriculture. Schultz said more than 230 species of the ants have been described.

(Agencies)