Leafcutter ants of Central and South America march along rainforest floors carrying chunks of leaf many times their own size. Most people assume they’re hauling the leaves home for dinner. They’re not. The ants are carrying compost back to feed a fungus garden in their underground nest.
Deep in the colony, worker ants chew the leaves into mulch and tend a special fungus that grows on it. The fungus produces tiny nutrient-rich knobs called gongylidia, and that’s what the ants actually eat. The colony - sometimes 8 million ants strong - can’t survive without the fungus, and the fungus can’t survive without the ants. It’s been a tight team-up for at least 50 million years.
That makes leafcutters Earth’s oldest farmers - by a huge margin. Humans only invented agriculture about 12,000 years ago. These ants were running fungus farms long before our species even existed.
