Rachelle M. M. Adams

TL;DR: The attine ant-fungus mutualism probably arose from adventitious interactions with fungi that grew on walls of nests built in leaf litter, or from a system of fungal myrmecochory in which specialized fungi relied on ants for dispersal and in which the ants fortuitously vectored these fungi from parent to offspring nests prior to a true fungicultural stage.

TL;DR: A phylogenetic analysis of 72 cultivars propagated by two fungus‐growing ant species coexisting sympatrically in central Panama indicates that cultivar exchanges between the two ant species occur routinely throughout ecological time and that coevolutionary processes between ants and their fungi are more diffuse than previously assumed.

TL;DR: The persistence of genetic structure among breeding colonies despite significant interisland movements suggests limits to the effectiveness of migration as a homogenizing force in this broadly distributed, extremely mobile species.

TL;DR: Comparison of cultivar and ant phylogenies suggests that a switch from lepiotaceous to pterulaceous fungiculture occurred only once in the history of the fungus‐growing ants, and a pattern of broad specialization by attine ants on defined cultivarClades, coupled with flexible switching between fungi within cultivar clades, is also found in other attine lineages.

TL;DR: The ability of attine ants to differentiate between closely related cultivar strains suggests that the ant--fungus mutualism is stabilized evolutionarily not only by partner feedback inherent in vertical cultivar transmission, but possibly also by symbiont choice through which the ants select against unwanted, presumably inferior, cultivars.