ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Nutrition mediates the expression of cultivar-farmer conflict in a fungus-growing ant.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- You are what your fungus eats: diet shapes the microbial garden of a fungus-growing ant.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2025Article
- Can the nutritional geometric framework unveil how macronutrients in pollen shape solitary bee foraging and survival?Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Harnessing Nutritional Niches to Explore Fungus-Animal Symbioses.Ecology letters · 2025Review
- Article
- Nutritional challenges of feeding a mutualist: Testing for a nutrient-toxin tradeoff in fungus-farming leafcutter ants.Ecology · 2022Article
- The multidimensional nutritional niche of fungus-cultivar provisioning in free-ranging colonies of a neotropical leafcutter ant.Ecology letters · 2021Article
- Nutritional niches reveal fundamental domestication trade-offs in fungus-farming ants.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Article
- Asexual and sexual reproduction are two separate developmental pathways in aBiology letters · 2020Article
- Fijian farming ants resolve the guns-or-butter dilemma for their crop plants.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Tradeoffs in the evolution of plant farming by ants.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Using Nutritional Geometry to Explore How Social Insects Navigate Nutritional Landscapes.Insects · 2020Review
- Investigation of Physicochemical Indices and Microbial Communities in Termite Fungus-Combs.Frontiers in microbiology · 2020Article
- Bumblebees adjust protein and lipid collection rules to the presence of brood.Current zoology · 2019Article
- The evolution of abdominal microbiomes in fungus-growing ants.Molecular ecology · 2019Article
- Using nutritional geometry to define the fundamental macronutrient niche of the widespread invasive ant Monomorium pharaonis.PloS one · 2019Article
- Article
- Disentangling nutritional pathways linking leafcutter ants and their co-evolved fungal symbionts using stable isotopes.Ecology · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Attine ants evolved farming 55-60 My before humans. Although evolutionarily derived leafcutter ants achieved industrial-scale farming, extant species from basal attine genera continue to farm loosely domesticated fungal cultivars capable of pursuing independent reproductive interests. We used feeding experiments with the basal attine Mycocepurus smithii to test whether reproductive allocation conflicts between farmers and cultivars constrain crop yield, possibly explaining why their mutualism has remained limited in scale and productivity. Stoichiometric and geometric framework approaches showed that carbohydrate-rich substrates maximize growth of both edible hyphae and inedible mushrooms, but that modest protein provisioning can suppress mushroom formation. Worker foraging was consistent with maximizing long-term cultivar performance: ant farmers could neither increase carbohydrate provisioning without cultivars allocating the excess toward mushroom production, nor increase protein provisioning without compromising somatic cultivar growth. Our results confirm that phylogenetically basal attine farming has been very successful over evolutionary time, but that unresolved host-symbiont conflict may have precluded these wild-type symbioses from rising to ecological dominance. That status was achieved by the evolutionarily derived leafcutter ants following full domestication of a coevolving cultivar 30-35 Mya after the first attine ants committed to farming.
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