Rethinking crop-disease management in fungus-growing ants

Ant fungus farming has become a prominent model for studying the evolution of mutualistic cooperation, with recent advances in reconstructing the evolutionary origin and elaborations of the symbiosis (1, 2), discovering additional partners and clarifying their interactions (3, 4), and analyzing host–symbiont conflict suppression (5). The attine ants are rivaled in their farming sophistication only by the Macrotermitinae, which evolved a similar obligate dependence on fungus gardens (6). The discovery of new antagonistic and mutualistic partners in the attine symbiosis has attracted wide attention, but the prevailing coevolutionary paradigm behind key components of this mutualism is now challenged by a study by Sen et al. in this issue of PNAS (7