Publication Date:
1998-09-25
Description:
Cultivation of fungi for food by fungus-growing ants (Attini: Formicidae) originated about 50 million years ago. The subsequent evolutionary history of this agricultural symbiosis was inferred from phylogenetic and population-genetic patterns of 553 cultivars isolated from gardens of "primitive" fungus-growing ants. These patterns indicate that fungus-growing ants succeeded at domesticating multiple cultivars, that the ants are capable of switching to novel cultivars, that single ant species farm a diversity of cultivars, and that cultivars are shared occasionally between distantly related ant species, probably by lateral transfer between ant colonies.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Mueller -- Rehner -- Schultz -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 1998 Sep 25;281(5385):2034-8.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉U. G. Mueller, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Apartado 2072, Balboa, Republic of Panama, and Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. S. A. Rehner, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Apart.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9748164" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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