*A leaf cutter ant, one of the more than 14,000 species alive today. Photo by Matthew Nelsen.
The Field Museum has a press release about research performed at the museum. The research looked at the evolutionary relationship of ants and flowering plants. Ants took advantage of the diversification of flowering plants, which led to the thousands of species of modern ants which exist today. A paper detailing the research can be found in the journal Evolutionary Letters.
Ants are pretty much everywhere. There are more than 14,000 different species, spread over every continent except Antarctica, and researchers have estimated that there are more than four quadrillion individual ants on Earth-- that’s 4,000,000,000,000,000. But how ants evolved to take over the world is still a mystery. In a new study in the journal Evolution Letters, scientists used a combination of fossils, DNA, and data on the habitat preferences of modern species to piece together how ants and plants have been evolving together over the past 60 million years. They found that when flowering plants spread out from forests, the ants followed, kicking off the evolution of the thousands of ant species alive today.
“When you look around the world today, you can see ants on nearly every continent occupying all these different habitats, and even different dimensions of those habitats-- some ants live underground, some live in the canopies of trees. We’re trying to understand how they were able to diversify from a single common ancestor to occupy all these different spaces,” says Matthew Nelsen, a research scientist at the Field Museum in Chicago and lead author of the paper.
Scientists already knew that ants and flowering plants, or angiosperms, both originated around 140 million years ago and subsequently became more prevalent and spread to new habitats. Nelsen and his colleagues wanted to find evidence that the two groups’ evolutionary paths were linked.