The "ANTS"

Fungus farming by attine ants predates homophile agriculture by about 50 million long time (Mueller, Rehner and Schultz, 1998). The ants live symbiotically with the fungi beca put on the particular fungi they make for nates break down fresh leaves into nutrients which the ants can use (Angier, 1994). The ants literally feed the leaves to the fungi, which, in their turn, metabolize the cellulose and chitin, materials that the ants cannot digest. The higher attines can thusly gorge themselves on the nutritious swellings of the fungus, the protein- and sugar-rich knobs called gongylidia, that bud mangle from the ends of the fungus, while lower attines generally feed on unadapted fungal hyphae (Ariniello, 1999). The attines comprise about 200 described species in 12 genera, all of which atomic number 18 dependent on fungiculture for provender (Currie, Mueller and Malloch, 1999). Extant species cultivate multiple, phylogenetically distant lineages of fungi, mostly belong to the family Lepiotaceae. These fungi used to exist in the caps of mushrooms, but in becoming symbiont with ants, the fungus has ceased making fruiting bodies to reproduce itself and instead has get hold to rely on the ants to spread their seed around (Angier, 1994). promote dish out the fungus clonally by carrying a ball of fungus in their spill when setting out to piss a new nest, and the cultivars propagate vegetati

Currie, C. R., Summerbell, J. A., & Malloch, D. (1999). Fungus- fuck offing ants use antibody-producing bacteria to pick up tend parasites. Nature, 398, pp. 701-704.

A mature fungal garden whitethorn contain 8 million ants, ranging in size from the small garden tenders to the egg-swollen queen who may be the size of an unshelled peanut. intimately of the nest is underground, with an elaborate labyrinth of passages and thousands of chambers ranging in size from that of a fist to the size of a soccer ball. To build such enormous nests, the ants must displace enough nation to fill a good-sized living room (Angier, 1994). The chambers are filled with the spongy gray hyphae of the fungus that feeds the entire colony.

Vast quantities of leaves are needed to feed such large ant colonies, and this leads to big destruction of vegetation.

In another garden subset, leaves, the normal forage of the fungal gardens, get out be sprayed with a suspension of the streptomycin-resistant microfungi and added to the hunt down area for the ants to take back to their gardens as food for their cultivars. The gardens lead then be sampled every three to four eld for the presence of streptomycin-resistant microfungi, and the gardens will be monitored for their health and their ability to treat to feed their ant populations. Various concentrations of microfungus in the spray will be tested to determine the concentration of streptomycin-resistant fungus necessary to choose about the death of an ant garden.

Samples of each representative fungus garden will be puzzlen from the original samples collected and allowed to grow to a suitable size for subdivision and testing. These sub-gardens will then each be subdivided, with one section being allowed to grow under normal conditions. The other section will be grown with the streptomycin-resistant microfungus added to the garden. Garden pairs will be observed and samples interpreted weekly to look for growth of the streptomycin-resistant microfungus, a
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