Evolution
Leafcutter ants are very specialized organisms in that they coevolved with another organism through symbiosis. This process took millions of years to occur, about 50 million years ago, which is when these ants began their relationship with plants (Hoyt 1996). The fungus eventually lost the ability to produce spores and the ants capitalized on that by making the fungus its main food source. About 65 million years ago, South America was isolated from other land masses, and this is when gardening ants started their relationship with a fungus (Hoyt 1996). It has been hypothesized that leafcutter ants propagated the same fungal lineage for 25 million years, which means they caused the fungus to reproduce itself (Hoyt 1996). The leafcutter ants are different from other ants by their underground fungi cultivation; they have not been thought to be derived from another ant, but they bear a resemblance to the harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex.
Read more about this topic: Atta (genus)
Famous quotes containing the word evolution:
“Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.”
—Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989)
“The more specific idea of evolution now reached is—a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.”
—Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)
“The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)