Article Pitch: Letter to the editors of Science Magazine
This letter was intended to pitch an article about fungus farming ants to Science magazine. Written in 2017.
Somewhere between ten and twelve thousand years ago, humans figured out how to grow food instead of foraging for it. The development of agriculture allowed us to settle in one place instead of constantly roaming in search of our next meal. Those settlements grew into towns and cities, and civilization was born. Now, we’re so good at farming that our population has boomed to 7.4 billion people. Our society has become unbelievably sophisticated and technologically advanced.
But we are only just starting to approach the level of the most advanced farmers on Earth: ants.
Famed author and entomologist E.O. Wilson once estimated that the total world population of ants was around 10 quadrillion individuals. More recently, scientists have made a more conservative estimate of 100 trillion, but that’s still enough to ruin your picnic. AntWeb, the online database for all ant species, lists over 16,000 valid recorded species. Of those, 250 species are farmers. They learned how to grow crops tens of millions of years before we did, and for much the same reason.
In my story I will outline the development of ant agriculture. Some 50 million years ago, a primitive ant began eating some sort of fungus, and her colony eventually became dependent on it. To ensure that they would always have their food of choice available, they and their descendants developed the means to grow the fungus within their nests. Over time, different branches of the family formed new preferences or adapted in different ways, but maintained their ability to cultivate fungus for food. Today, fungus farming ants range from tiny, primitive species with small simple gardens all the way up to huge, highly advanced “civilizations”. The fungus evolved along with each ant species, to the point of a completely symbiotic relationship between the ant and the fungus: neither can live without the other.
I will discuss how ant agriculture bears little resemblance to our neatly tilled fields of corn and wheat. Instead, ants grow gardens of fungus in underground chambers. Most people wouldn’t identify an ant fungus garden as agriculture at a glance; they look more like white or yellow-grey sponge. But ants are actually remarkably similar to humans in their farming practices. Their fungus is cultivated just as carefully as our crops of fruits and vegetables. Ants “weed” their gardens by sniffing out and removing contaminants, using the antibiotics that their bodies naturally produce. Some species have even been known to herd aphids in the same way that humans herd cattle or sheep.
My article will focus on leafcutter ants, one of the most sophisticated fungus farming species, as an example. They are frequently seen traveling in lines carrying chunks of leaves, but they don’t actually eat the leaves. Instead, they process the leaves into a sort of mulch, use it as a growing surface for their specific fungus, and then eat the fungus they grow. Leafcutters live in enormous networks of underground chambers; a single nest can be thirty square meters and extend three or four meters deep. They have evolved to have a complex society with different castes devoted to tending the garden, taking care of the larvae, foraging for leaves, defending the nest, or removing waste to the most ventilated chamber in the nest. Every single member of the colony is dedicated to their role in growing and processing food.
Ants, as you might expect, have very small brains. They do not have the capacity to consciously decide who does what, or to individually plan out their gardens. So how can they have such complex social behavior? In my story I will describe the concept of emergence – many individuals performing simple tasks that contribute to collective sophisticated behaviors. Colonies essentially function like one gigantic brain with each individual ant acting like a neuron. This group mentality has evolved in social insects over 130 million years.
But despite collectively acting like a brain, ants do not have consciousness like humans do. We have the advantages of forethought, planning, and learning through observation. My article will conclude with the observation that this has allowed us to do in a mere ten thousand years what fungus-farming ants did in 50 million years.