Journal
NATURE ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION
Volume 5, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
NATURE RESEARCH
DOI: 10.1038/s41559-020-01314-x
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- STRI
- EU Marie Sklodowska-Curie International Incoming Fellowship [327940]
- Centre for Social Evolution at the University of Copenhagen (Danish National Research Foundation) [DNRF57]
- ERC [ANTS: 323085, ELEVATE: 757810]
- SJU
- NSF-DEB [2016372]
- Smithsonian Institution Competitive Grant
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Division Of Environmental Biology [2016372] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The study reveals a similar domestication trade-off in the farming systems of attine ants as in human agriculture. Ants with different farming systems vary in their abilities to harvest resources and cultivate diverse crops, while small-scale farms with genetic diversity of cultivars may offer population-wide resilience benefits.
During crop domestication, human farmers traded greater productivity for higher crop vulnerability outside specialized cultivation conditions. We found a similar domestication trade-off across the major co-evolutionary transitions in the farming systems of attine ants. First, the fundamental nutritional niches of cultivars narrowed over similar to 60 million years of naturally selected domestication, and laboratory experiments showed that ant farmers representing subsequent domestication stages strictly regulate protein harvest relative to cultivar fundamental nutritional niches. Second, ants with different farming systems differed in their abilities to harvest the resources that best matched the nutritional needs of their fungal cultivars. This was assessed by quantifying realized nutritional niches from analyses of items collected from the mandibles of laden ant foragers in the field. Third, extensive field collections suggest that among-colony genetic diversity of cultivars in small-scale farms may offer population-wide resilience benefits that species with large-scale farming colonies achieve by more elaborate and demanding practices to cultivate less diverse crops. Our results underscore that naturally selected farming systems have the potential to shed light on nutritional trade-offs that shaped the course of culturally evolved human farming.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available