Leafcutter ants cannot digest the leaves they famously carry — instead they feed the clippings to an underground fungus, Leucoagaricus gongylophorus, and eat swollen nutrient-rich tips the fungus grows in return. Genomic evidence dates this farming partnership to roughly 66 million years ago, in the aftermath of the dinosaur-killing asteroid. The post Leafcutter ants don’t eat the leaves they carry home in long green columns — they feed the clippings to an underground fungus, and it is the fungus they farm and eat, a practice that predates human agriculture by around 50 million years appeared first on Space Daily .
Leafcutter ants don’t eat the leaves they carry home in long green columns — they feed the clippings to an underground fungus, and it is the fungus they farm and eat, a practice that predates human agriculture by around 50 million years
