Farming and chemical warfare: A day in the life ...( One of the most important developmen...)
One of the most important developments in human civilisation was the practice of sustainable agriculture. But we were not the first - ants have been doing it for over 50 million years. Just as farming helped humans become a dominant species, it has also helped leaf-cutter ants become dominant herbivores, and one of the most successful social insects in nature. According to an article in the November issue of Microbiology Today, leaf-cutter ants have developed a system to try and keep their gardens pest-free; an impressive feat which has evaded even human agriculturalists.
Leaf-cutter ants put their freshly-cut leaves in gardens where they grow a special fungus that they eat. New material is continuously incorporated into the gardens to grow the fungus and old material is removed by the ants and placed in special refuse dumps away from the colony. The ants have also adopted the practice of weeding. When a microbial pest is detected by worker ants, there is an immediate flurry of activity as ants begin to comb through the garden. When they find the pathogenic 'weeds', the ants pull them out and discard them into their refuse dumps.
"Since the ant gardens are maintained in soil chambers, they are routinely exposed to a number of potential pathogens that could infect and overtake a garden. In fact, many of the ant colonies do become overgrown by fungal pathogens, often killing the colony," said Professor Cameron Currie from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. "Scientists have shown that a specialized microfungal pathogen attacks the gardens of the fungus-growing ants. These fungi directly attack and kill the crop fungus, and can overrun the garden in a similar fashion to the way weeds and pests can ruin human gardens."
A curious observation was that some worker ants had a white wax-like substance across their bodies. When they looked at it under a microscope scientists discovered that this covering was not a wax, but a bacterium! Th
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| Contact: Lucy Goodchild press@sgm.ac.uk 44-011-898-81843 Society for General Microbiology Source:Eurekalert |
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