You know what? Humans are not the first species on earth to learn to grow crops.
Image source network
On this planet, there is an ancient, long-cultivated creature that abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle 50 million years ago and began to live a life of "farming", they are leaf-cutting ants.
Leaf cutter ants
From the name, the leaf-cutting ant seems to be a leaf-eating ant, but in fact, they do not eat the leaves directly, but cut the leaves into countless small pieces and bring them back to the nest for fermentation, until small mushrooms grow on them, and then feed the larvae with mushrooms.
Adults mainly suck up the juice that flows from the leaves they shred. Leafcutter ants can damage some plants, including crops, so many places recognize leafcutter ants as pests that disrupt crop growth.
As the second largest and most complex eusocial animal after humans, leafcutter ants have obvious differentiation, and in leafcutter nests are generally composed of queens and worker ants, and worker ants will also differentiate into different types of workers according to their size:
The smallest mini-ants are part-time nannies for gardeners, farming and caring for offspring;
The slightly larger small ants are the main force of the ant colony, and they are also the largest number of workers, who can collect food and fight;
The larger medium-sized ants are completely reduced to coolies, cutting leaves and moving leaves;
The largest large ants are war machines, the main force defending their homes, and occasionally doing some hard work such as moving barricades.
Image source Petal Net
food
And the fungus that is used as the food of leaf-cutting ants is not casually picked up outside. As a species with 50 million years of cultivation experience, fungi have a very important significance for them, so in the process of cultivating fungi,
They carefully cultivate these fungi, provide them with chopped food fragments, and also frequently clean up other pests and molds, and the leafcutter ant's posterior thoracic plate gland grows Pseudonocardia with actinomycete phylum, which secretes chemicals that can assist leafcutter ants.
If the leaves of certain plants are poisonous to these fungi, the colony stops collecting the leaves of such plants.
The first fungal colonies were just over 2,000 worker ants, and the number of leaf-cutting ants in a nest could reach one million, and the terrifying number also allowed leaf-cutting ants to control the entire rainforest, and the vast army scavenged for plant raw materials without any other creatures daring to easily offend.
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