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.
Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction
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Re: Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction
#12They may yet learn to farm nutrition from plastic during a different mass extinction.
Such changes could be millions of years in the making
Re: Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction
#13Ants also farm aphids, so they may have beaten us to livestock farming too
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!
The Queen of Trees is an excellent documentary
Re: Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction
#14Re: Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction
#15They may yet learn to farm nutrition from plastic during a different mass extinction.
Such changes could be millions of years in the making
I think it has already started¹.
1: https://neurosciencenews.com/microplastics-brain-health-2779...
Re: Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction
#16Yet 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.
Re: Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction
#17Yet 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.
Yet another comment saying someone is wrong with no context or links for the rest of us. :(
Re: Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction
#18Yet 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.
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
Re: Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction
#19This 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.
Re: Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction
#20They 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.