The coevolution of fungus-ant agriculture. Journal Articles uri icon

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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.

authors

  • Schultz, Ted R
  • Sosa-Calvo, Jeffrey
  • Kweskin, Matthew P
  • Lloyd, Michael W
  • Dentinger, Bryn
  • Kooij, Pepijn W
  • Vellinga, Else C
  • Rehner, Stephen A
  • Rodrigues, Andre
  • Montoya, Quimi V
  • Fernández-Marín, Hermógenes
  • Ješovnik, Ana
  • Niskanen, Tuula
  • Liimatainen, Kare
  • Leal-Dutra, Caio A
  • Solomon, Scott E
  • Gerardo, Nicole M
  • Currie, Cameron
  • Bacci, Mauricio
  • Vasconcelos, Heraldo L
  • Rabeling, Christian
  • Faircloth, Brant C
  • Doyle, Vinson P

publication date

  • October 4, 2024