Richard Dawkins: Ants that farm, compost and weed - Nebraska Vignettes #4
Richard Dawkins explains how fungus-farming ants from Central and South America make their living. Download Quicktime version (720p HD): http://cdn.cloudfiles.mosso.com/c116791/Ants4.mov...
==========
- These are fungus farming ants, which live in Central and South America. They’re amazing creatures. They don’t actually eat the plants that they gather themselves. They gather plants, huge quantities of leaves, which they cut, beautifully cut with little scissor jaws, and then carry them back to the nest, where they use them as compost to grow a fungus, and it’s the fungus that they actually eat. The fungus produces sprouting mushrooms, and they eat those. So the ants gather the compost on which the fungus grows. Huge colonies, gigantic colonies of these fungus growing ants. They’re farming ants. Now, unfortunately, there’s another species of fungus which is a pest. It’s a crop pest which specializes only in growing on the ants’ own f...
==========
- These are fungus farming ants, which live in Central and South America. They’re amazing creatures. They don’t actually eat the plants that they gather themselves. They gather plants, huge quantities of leaves, which they cut, beautifully cut with little scissor jaws, and then carry them back to the nest, where they use them as compost to grow a fungus, and it’s the fungus that they actually eat. The fungus produces sprouting mushrooms, and they eat those. So the ants gather the compost on which the fungus grows. Huge colonies, gigantic colonies of these fungus growing ants. They’re farming ants. Now, unfortunately, there’s another species of fungus which is a pest. It’s a crop pest which specializes only in growing on the ants’ own f...
