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:
“Like Freud, Jung believes that the human mind contains archaic remnants, residues of the long history and evolution of mankind. In the unconscious, primordial “universally human images” lie dormant. Those primordial images are the most ancient, universal and “deep” thoughts of mankind. Since they embody feelings as much as thought, they are properly “thought feelings.” Where Freud postulates a mass psyche, Jung postulates a collective psyche.”
—Patrick Mullahy (b. 1912)
“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)
“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)