ANTSTORE World of Ants

[thecowmaster]

Today in my biology exam apeared a group of questions related with the cutting leaves ants XD (it is only to share that)

one of the questions made me mad, because i started do write and then i found that was a big mistake, and i had to write it again.

I will put the question here, try to anwser XD:

Explain, with the darwinism point of view way, the process of the evolution of the cutting leaves ants which allows them, today, avoid using the leaves that produce insecticides and funguscides.

(it is the darwinism point of view not neo-darwinism)

And i have to say all students of the 11º grade with biology had to answer this question today

Good luck

[tail__]

It seems easy... colonies which collected all leaves, including toxic ones, either died (if they are very toxic) or at least developed slower, and produced less new queens and males. Colonies which through unusual mutation had a genetic predisposition to dislike unhealthy leaves (this mutation of course needed to happen only once, in queen's genes, as mutations of worker genes are totally irrelevant), grew better, and had more new queens and males, which preserved their "diet genes", and then mixed them with sexual offspring of other, less fortunate colonies. The offspring colonies having queen with these genes developed better and so on. After only a few generations whole population must have these genes.

[thecowmaster]

i think it is correct, execept the fact you talked about mutations

(it is darwinism not neo-darwinism )

but it was a nice answer

[Phasmid]

How many marks was it?

You could just say: "Colonies that could not detect fungicides and insecticides failed but colonies that could detect toxins survived and passed their genes onto the next generation. Any colonies that cannot detect toxic plants just don't make it, leaving only better ants".
Although that would be natural selection rather than evolution (the process of evolution for this ability would take you back to a time well before leaf-cutters) .

The ablility to detect toxins in plants would happened well before ants evolved to cut leaves, or even lost the sting. There are many ant sp. that grow fungus but don't cut leaves, they have to see what is toxic too .

You could go on about how mutations get them there but that story is way to long (and broken) .

Also it is believed that part of the detection is actualy done by the fungus, ants take leaves from a new plant to the fungus garden, if its bad then the fungus produces "bad" pheromones and the ants simply stop taking leaves from that plant.
Which makes sense from my experience, I my Acros have quickly taken leaves from a plant, but, shortly after putting the leaves on the fungus, dumped them in the rubbish pile.

(and I don't think I managed to avoid neo-darwinism lol )

[thecowmaster]

it was 20 points in 200

[JimmyVe]

Good topic for a nice discussion.

[ScoobTheNoob]

Today in my biology exam apeared a group of questions related with the cutting leaves ants XD (it is only to share that)

one of the questions made me mad, because i started do write and then i found that was a big mistake, and i had to write it again.

I will put the question here, try to anwser XD:

Explain, with the darwinism point of view way, the process of the evolution of the cutting leaves ants which allows them, today, avoid using the leaves that produce insecticides and funguscides.

(it is the darwinism point of view not neo-darwinism)

And i have to say all students of the 11º grade with biology had to answer this question today

Good luck

Ok, non neo Darwinism explains this! 20 points and thank you.