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Nature 398, 747-748 (29 April 1999) | doi:10.1038/19619

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Ants, plants and antibiotics

Ted R. Schultz1

The partnership between ants and their fungal gardens has a newly discovered third member — a bacterium, which grows on the ants' bodies and produces antibiotics to kill a parasite that infects their crops.Roughly 50 million years ago in South America, a lone species of ant abandoned its primitive hunter-gatherer ways and, in a unique event in ant evolution, adopted an agrarian lifestyle.

  1. Ted R. Schultz is in the Department of Entomology, National Museum of Natural History, MRC 165, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20560, USA.
    e-mail: Email: schultz@onyx.si.edu