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:
“As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree from its seed, or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural intervention.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)
“The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)