1. The coevolution of fungus-ant agriculture.
- Author
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Schultz TR, Sosa-Calvo J, Kweskin MP, Lloyd MW, Dentinger B, Kooij PW, Vellinga EC, Rehner SA, Rodrigues A, Montoya QV, Fernández-Marín H, Ješovnik A, Niskanen T, Liimatainen K, Leal-Dutra CA, Solomon SE, Gerardo NM, Currie CR, Bacci M Jr, Vasconcelos HL, Rabeling C, Faircloth BC, and Doyle VP
- Subjects
- Animals, Agriculture, Domestication, Photosynthesis, Phylogeny, South America, Ants microbiology, Ants genetics, Biological Coevolution, Fungi genetics, Fungi classification, Symbiosis
- 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.
- Published
- 2024
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