These ants aren’t eating the leaves they carry—they use plant matter to cultivate a special fungus in their underground chambers. It’s like farming, but instead of growing vegetables, they grow the ...

Ants — yes, ants — could protect apples, nuts, cocoa, and other beloved crops from disease and climate change.

The ants plant, protect, provision, and cultivate their fungus, which then provides the ants with a stable food supply.

cultivating bumper crops of fungi that are the ants' sole food source. Foragers cut pieces of leaves from trees and drag them home to their nest, where others chew them into a paste that becomes ...

Ants communicate and cooperate by secreting pheromones, or scent chemicals, that can alert others to danger or lead them to a promising food source. They typically eat nectar, seeds, fungus ...

For centuries we have believed that humans were unique in our ability to farm and cultivate our own food. However, it turns out that ants grow their own food too. Have you ever seen a trail of ...

ADAM:'Leaf cutter ants, despite their name, don't eat leaves. They bring them into the nest as a food supply for the fungus they're growing inside and it's the fungus that they eat. ADAM:'Our ants ...

The researchers cultured a fungus that, in the wild ... Other facts: Black garden ants don’t just hunt food—they farm it. They often live alongside colonies of aphids, which secrete a ...

“These ants are amazing organisms. They cut leaves and they use that leaf material to grow a fungus for food,” explained Cameron Currie, lead researcher and a biochemistry and biomedical ...

The pressure of feeding so many mouths has made ants the masters of finding food. Many species ferociously ... use leaf and grass cuttings to cultivate a unique fungus within their nest.

Several lineages were already growing their own food, including multiple groups of fungus-farming ants. Entomologist Ted Schultz, the museum’s curator of ants, has spent 35 years studying how ...

These ants aren’t eating the leaves they carry—they use plant matter to cultivate a special fungus in their underground chambers. It’s like farming, but instead of growing vegetables, they grow the ...