Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction | Hacker News Reader

Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction

arstechnica.com

221 pointsLinuxBender64 comments

I still remember this episode from the 80s when sir David Attenborough climbs into a termite mound up to 6 feet below the surface.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbbLCgh6sso

These termites are fungus farmers and feed the gigantic queen with it.

Unfortunately the fungus farming is not part of this clip, but it is also described the same program.

Edit: This is an older version of sir David Attenborough, revisiting another mound and talking about fungus farming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGaT0B__2DM

The termites built a heat sink for their colony! That's crazy.

https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Ants-Story-Scientific-Explora...

EO Wilson’s book on ants is a personal favorite. This also has guides on how to catch and cultivate.

My cousin has an ant farm. The book should be interesting for him.

Reminded of this:

> David wondered if, rather than humans going extinct and letting the mushrooms take over, humans could eat the mushrooms and survive. That question led him and Joshua Pearce to research and write Feeding Everyone No Matter What

https://allfed.info/about

They may yet learn to farm nutrition from plastic during a different mass extinction.

Such changes could be millions of years in the making

Evolution, like geology, tends to happen in fits and starts - yes, it happens over very long timescales as a general phenomenon, but significant changes tend to happen in very short timescales, before then annealing over a population and finding equilibrium over a longer timescale.

Take lactose tolerance in humans, for instance. That happened almost spontaneously in Northern European populations 6kYa, as it was such an advantageous trait for herdsmen, but then spread slowly - to the extent that it is still not a ubiquitous trait of sapiens. Many such examples, human and otherwise.

I expect there are already plastic fixing bacteria out there, but they have not yet proliferated or optimised the trait. Should other food sources dwindle for whatever reason, this trait will become ubiquitous, rapidly, as competing populations die off.

If there are bacteria that can feed on plastic (not saying there aren't), wouldn't they have essentially no competition and thus thrive in plastic polluted environments?

There are plastic eating bacteria [https://letstalkscience.ca/educational-resources/backgrounde...].

Human cells can also (mostly) function anaerobically (aka in low-oxygen environments). It’s terribly inefficient though, and we can only do it for limited periods of time before something bad starts to happen to the overall organism.

So we prefer oxygen, and as long as we have oxygen rich environments, we’re never going to get that much better at being anaerobic eh?

Do those exist? Plastic is everywhere in small quantities, but so are lots of other things bacteria can feed on in those environments. Those other things also have the advantage of being part of a eco system meaning that more of it grows in ways bacteria can exploit.

Only if plastic is a better energy source than other energy sources they can already consume. I mean, if we had an obligate plastivore then yes, what you describe would happen, but I guess we haven’t - yet.

They are bacteria, they convert plastic to energy for fu and then get eaten by other bacteria, they don’t turn into plastic.

I'm reminded of a documentary I saw a few years ago, where they discussed ways our modern cities are already starting to affect the evolution of animals that live in them.

One example was of a species of birds in a specific area starting to develop shorter wings with higher maneuverability, because the ones with larger ones were more likely to get hit by vehicles: https://www.npr.org/2013/03/22/175054275/birds-evolve-shorte...

The film 'Crimes of the future' from David Cronenberg talks about this, though the subject matter is pollution and plastic instead of milk.

I think it has already started¹.

1: https://neurosciencenews.com/microplastics-brain-health-2779...

What does this have to do with ants evolving to eat plastic ?

Maybe he means the mass extinction has already started (due to plastic pollution).

In the case of the zombie ants, the fungus farms the ants

The zombie qualifier might not be needed. The recent book "The Light Eaters" delves slightly into the theoretical frameworks that reverse the causality of agriculture.

What does it mean for ants to "learn?" Did the fungi "teach" them? How did the fungi "learn" to "teach?"

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/196774338-the-light-eate...

Ants also farm aphids, so they may have beaten us to livestock farming too

They also spelt barley. I’ve watched the sugar ants here with fascination as late every summer they gather vast quantities of barley corns, and then drag them below ground. A few weeks later they eject heaps of husks around the entrances to their nests, and on the one occasion I accidentally dug into one of their nests, it stank like a malthouse.

I can only assume that their purpose is to convert the carbohydrates in the grain into sugars by encouraging the germination process, which they then live off through the winter.

I can’t actually seem to find any documentation of the behaviour, but after seeing them do it for the five years we’ve lived here, I’m under the impression it’s no fluke.

An article on another species doing this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5125654/

Seeing ants crawling up and down a tree is how I discovered that the tree was infested with aphids.

Observing can be a helpful clue

I learned this fact from watching the documentary "The Queen of trees", quite fascinating! It blew my mind when I first saw it. The documentary is free on YouTube!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xy86ak2fQJM

This one?

That's the one!

The Queen of Trees is an excellent documentary

ants save them through the winter and then spread them

New conspiracy theory: ants developed Factorio to train us to their thinking and organization.

It goes farther up the chain, it's actually the fungi's plan

This is awesome. We could do the same. Those oyster mushroom drones got me thinking. With fungus we could build perpetual motion machines to generate infinite energy or food. Just like the ants.

I don't understand the downvotes. There's tech potential with fungus. We can see drones controlled by fungus: https://www.popsci.com/technology/fungus-robot/

If they generate power in response to sunlight, we could organize the drones in a way to generate solar power with a turbine or something similar.

Maybe due to "to generate infinite energy?" To the extent that you might mean "capture solar or other energy sources into more usable forms" I don't think you are necessarily wrong, but the phrasing does sound like "perpetual motion machine."

I mean generate infinite energy with a perpetual motion machine. The drones power themselves once the mycelium forms connections. The idea is infinite energy generated by mushroom drones in organized movement.

I upvoted :)

Yet another science piece that perpetuates the misconception that “the mass extinction killed the dinosaurs”. The clade of dinosaurs is not extinct and it bothers me that science writers don't seem to learn this fact and keep getting it wrong.

'The extinction of non-Avian Dinosaurs' just doesn't roll off the tongue.

I get the "everyone knows what was meant" approach... but not everyone knows.

What the general public considers dinosaurs has no overlap with the existing animals that scientists consider dinosaurs.

While technically correct, it’s not useful nomenclature for public discussion.

The audience of Ars isn't "general" and the usage wasn't colloquial. The article is about evolution and the pressures that caused the adaptation. It would have been nice if the author had demonstrated a bit more knowledge of the topic. Its a mistake that grows less forgivable the more years that pass. Hell, I recall the days when people frequently called whales fish. That wouldn't fly in article about evolution now, and neither should this.

Dinosaur literally means ‘terrible lizard’. It was originally coined as a description for the large, extinct, giant lizards. T-Rex, etc.

That it has later come to encompass things like seagulls is more a bait and switch on the public, than the public being idiots.

You might as well beat up on someone for calling Pluto a planet. Oh wait, it technically is again? My bad. Oh wait, it’s technically a dwarf planet. My mistake again!

Clearly, I’m the one who is an idiot, and it has nothing to do with experts causing confusion because it gets them headlines/justifies their existence and makes them feel superior to everyone else.

Bait and switch? Idiots? We are just saying we expect more from science communicators. Adding "non-avian" before the word "dinosaurs" wouldn't have made the article inaccessible to folks who haven't internalized the whole notion of clades.

Do penguins and cassowary count as "non-avian dinosaurs?" The videos of cassowary definitely give me Jurassic Park vibes.

In any case, many people are aware birds are not extinct. As a result, a claim of a "mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs" would implicitly not include "avian dinosaurs." Adding the "non-avian" qualifier does not assist in describing the particular global change to which the article refers.

It would however help to not perpetuate the misconceptions that all dinosaurs were killed at the end of the Cretaceous.

Would it? Because all the Terrible Lizards (or what anyone could reasonably call something one) DID go extinct then. [https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/when-did-dinosaurs-become-extinct].

Honestly, I think it’s just paleontologists sticking to the Dinosaur name because it gets them funding. ‘Doing a dig for dinosaur bones’, or being a ‘Dinosaur specialist’ is a lot more sellable than ‘expert in late Cretaceous avian precursors’, or digging for ‘bird precursor fossils’.

Which is what non ‘terrible lizard’ dinosaur studies are about.

Egyptology has a similar problem. Everyone wants to be known as someone who studies the pyramids, because being the dude that digs in the middens near a random Mastaba for a pharaoah nobody ever heard in the middle of desert that no tourist will ever want to visit is a lot harder to sell, even if it is better actual archeology.

Funny you skipped over all my actual examples, eh? How are seagulls ‘terrible lizards’?

Isn’t the public perception the actually more honest one?

Back in the 1800s when the name Dinosaur was coined no one suspected their connection to birds. The point has never been that the word, in most peoples minds, doesn't conjures up pictures of t-rex and triceratops. There's no argument there. The point is that someone writing an article for Ars should have not have perpetuated the common misconception that they all went extinct.

All the ‘terrible lizards’ DID go extinct.

Not the clade of 'terrible lizards'. Paleontology accepts the cladistic view and so should a popular science article.

The clade has been expanded well beyond its literal, historic, or popular understanding.

Which is why the popular science article is confused, because the articles point is actually more correct from a popular point of view, while being at odds with the technical (but weird) newer definition.

Because the ‘terrible lizards’ DID go extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, and what ended up evolving from their not really terrible, and not really land bound brethren at the time, while still with us, weren’t generally what any reasonable person would call a Terrible Lizard.

The taxonomy argument is a technical one that for the most part only interests people whose sole job is arguing about taxonomy. Which is a thing, but c’mon.

Which is why stuff like this exists and isn’t really wrong. [https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/when-did-dinosaurs-become-extinct]. Because 99.99% of people looking for Dinosaur Bones are going to be really really confused if you hand them some chicken drumsticks. Even if technically it is correct.

If someone asked for a dinosaur fossil and you showed them a small winged thing embedded in a rock they likely would be confused too. Wind the clock back 65 million years to before the Cretaceous extinction event. The first bird like dinos appear in the Jurassic, ~100 millions year before the extinction. The time of the dinosaurs was full of small and large dinos adapted to all sorts of niches. In the end the flying therapods were the survivors.

We clearly have different view points, but I've enjoyed the discussion.

I think we’re actually both in agreement, actually.

Yet another comment saying someone is wrong with no context or links for the rest of us. :(

Birds are part of the dinosaur clade and alive and well! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avialae

My apologies. I will provide links next time. For now, my sibling comment will do the trick. Birds are dinosaurs, so dinosaurs are not extinct.

The more I learn about ants, the more it seems to me that they are the ones who will take over the world. I'm starting to fear them.

Earth: Human population: 8.2 billion humans. Ant population: 20 quadrillion ants.

I'm not sure they need to take over the world - it looks like it is already theirs.

But what's their GDP?

Maybe their life is better than ours because they don't sorry about number goes up.

Their (individual ants) life is not better than ours, because they often die horribly for the greater good.

Their (ants as a society) life IS better because they are willing to sacrifice themselves for the rest of their society, mostly unconditionally.

No ant has ever raised a series A.

Fear the cockroaches they stand a better chance

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