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You have probably seen leaf-cutter ants carrying bits of plants, maybe in a nature documentary, at a science museum or in the “Circle of Life” song at the beginning of the 1994 Disney animated film “The Lion King.”
Those ants don’t eat the leaves — instead they bring them back to their nests to feed a garden of fungi, which produce food for the ants.
Researchers have now used DNA analysis to uncover just how long ants have been farming fungi, now described in a study published Thursday in the journal Science. It turns out these insects have been some of the world’s tiniest farmers for 66 million years, thanks in part to the asteroid that struck Earth and set off a chain of events that led to the demise of the dinosaurs.
Fungi are a kingdom of life more closely related to animals than to plants, and many of them consume decaying plant matter. Some fungi make fruiting bodies that we know as mushrooms as part of their reproductive cycles, but they also produce a branching network of threadlike struc