Ants have adapted to follow the plants important to them in the evolutionary process. This has been reported by the Fields Museum.
Both ants and flowering plants appeared about 140 million years ago and gradually populated almost the entire earth. According to scientists, there are 14,000 different species and four thousand trillion individuals on the planet.
Matthew Nelsen and colleagues decided checkWhether the evolutionary paths of ants and flowering plants are related. To find out, they compared the climates of 1,400 modern ant species, including temperature and precipitation data. They combined this information with the reconstruction of the ant family tree based on the genetic information and stayed in January. Many ant behaviors, such as nesting and habitat selection, are so deeply rooted in species lineages that scientists can determine the lifestyles of ancient ants based on their modern relatives.
It turned out that about 60 million years ago, ants mostly lived in forests and made their nests underground. Later, some trees started to release more steam and increase the humidity in the forests, making them look like the tropics, in connection with this, some species migrated from the forest cover and began to live in the trees. Then some flowering plants began to adapt to a drier climate, and some insects followed.
“Other scientists have shown that plants in these arid habitats begin to produce food for ants, including elaiosomes, which are the fleshy ‘attachments’ on seeds,” says Nelsen. “When ants take seeds to get elaiosomes, they help disperse them, benefiting the plant.”
This study shows how important the role of plants in an ecosystem is in creating living conditions for everyone else.