Nutritional niches reveal fundamental domestication trade-offs in fungus-farming ants.

ABSTRACT: 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 ~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 niche

SUBMITTER: Shik JZ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7610523 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature