A study co-authored by two LSU professors reveals that ants began cultivating and farming fungi millions of years before humans started agriculture after an asteroid struck Earth 66 million years ago.

“Ants have been practicing agriculture and fungus farming for much longer than humans have existed,” Smithsonian entomologist Ted Schultz, who led the study, said in a statement.

LSU professors Vinson P. Doyle and Brant C. Faircloth contributed to the study by developing molecular methods to capture genetic data. They analyzed DNA from 475 species of fungi and 276 species of ants to trace the origin of fungal farming.

Researchers connected decaying leaf litter to fungi as its main food source – ants were drawn to the plant for this reason. Doyle and Faircloth’s molecular methods were used in this aspect of the work.

“When you have teeny-tiny fragments of a fungus that an ant is carrying inside of it, it’s hard to get enough fungal material to generate sufficient genome sequence data to analyze,” Doyle said in a statement. “That’s where the fungal bait sets we created come in. They allowed us to pull the DNA from miniscule bits of fungi, amplify it, sequence it and analyze it.”
The research publication coincides with the 150th anniversary of Thomas Belt and Fritz Mueller’s discovery of ant fungus farming.