Mueller UG, Rehner SA, Schultz TR
U. G. Mueller, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Apartado 2072, Balboa, Republic of Panama, and Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. S. A. Rehner, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Apart.
Science. 1998 Sep 25;281(5385):2034-8. doi: 10.1126/science.281.5385.2034.
Cultivation of fungi for food by fungus-growing ants (Attini: Formicidae) originated about 50 million years ago. The subsequent evolutionary history of this agricultural symbiosis was inferred from phylogenetic and population-genetic patterns of 553 cultivars isolated from gardens of "primitive" fungus-growing ants. These patterns indicate that fungus-growing ants succeeded at domesticating multiple cultivars, that the ants are capable of switching to novel cultivars, that single ant species farm a diversity of cultivars, and that cultivars are shared occasionally between distantly related ant species, probably by lateral transfer between ant colonies.
切叶蚁（蚁科：切叶蚁亚科）培育真菌作为食物的行为起源于约5000万年前。这种农业共生关系随后的进化史是根据从“原始”切叶蚁蚁巢中分离出的553个培养品种的系统发育和群体遗传模式推断出来的。这些模式表明，切叶蚁成功驯化了多个品种，能够转而培育新的品种，单个蚁种养殖多种品种，而且品种偶尔会在亲缘关系较远的蚁种之间共享，可能是通过蚁群之间的横向转移。
