Dietary diversity, sociality, and the evolution of ant gustation

EJ Smith, J Vizueta, MA Younger, SP Mullen… - Frontiers in Ecology …, 2023 - frontiersin.org
Ants have remarkably diverse diets and extraordinary species richness, making them an
excellent model system to study the evolution of taste. In this entirely eusocial clade, food …

Reciprocal nutritional provisioning between leafcutter ants and their fungal cultivar mediates performance of symbiotic farming systems

M Bolander, JE Andersen, BH Conlon… - Functional …, 2023 - Wiley Online Library
Optimized food acquisition is challenging because foraged diet items are chemically
complex and often nutritionally imbalanced. These challenges are likely magnified when …

Evidence that the domesticated fungus Leucoagaricus gongylophorus recycles its cytoplasmic contents as nutritional rewards to feed its leafcutter ant farmers

CA Leal-Dutra, LM Yuen, BAM Guedes… - IMA fungus, 2023 - Springer
Leafcutter ants farm a fungal cultivar (Leucoagaricus gongylophorus) that converts inedible
vegetation into food that sustains colonies with up to millions of workers. Analogous to …

Nutritional challenges of feeding a mutualist

AJJ Crumière, S Mallett, A Michelsen, R Rinnan… - Ecology, 2022 - JSTOR
The biochemical heterogeneity of food items often yields tradeoffs as each bite of food tends
to contain some nutrients in surplus and others in deficit, as well as other less palatable or …

A domesticated fungal cultivar recycles its cytoplasmic contents as nutritional rewards for its leafcutter ant farmers

CA Leal-Dutra, LM Yuen, PE Marques, BAM Guedes… - bioRxiv, 2022 - biorxiv.org
Leafcutter ants farm a fungal cultivar (Leucoagaricus gongylophorus) that converts inedible
vegetation into food that sustains colonies with up to millions of workers. Analogous to …

Macronutrient Regulation by the Desert Leafcutter Ant Acromyrmex versicolor

N Smith - 2022 - search.proquest.com
Understanding how and why animals choose what to eat is one of the fundamental goals of
nutritional and behavioral biology. We can scale this question to animals that live in social …