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About 60 million years ago, ants and fungi entered into an underground partnership that they continue to this day. Why?
From Brazil, researcher Pepijn Kooij explains why the two species cannot live without each other in this collaboration, how the ants are used as transport trucks and the fungus even lets you know if it’s not happy with the leaves that are brought.
We already know a lot about collaboration, but not everything. This fungus is related to our fungus, but no fungus grows from it. For the ants – who cause the fungus to spread to new branches in their colony – that’s wasted energy. But how does the ant stop the fungus from growing them anyway?
Kooij and his colleagues recently discovered that these mushrooms are now starting to grow in certain places. He suspected it might have something to do with climate change and indeed found a correlation. It remains to be seen whether this change is also bad for cooperation.
Read more about this research here: Climate change influences basidiom emergence of leafcutter ant cultivars†
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