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Evolutionary biology

Farming writ small

Nature volume 469, pages 308–309 (2011)Cite this article

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Social slime moulds graze on bacteria, but save some for transmission in their spores. Strains practising this primitive form of farming coexist with non-farmer strains in an intriguing cost–benefit equilibrium. See Letter p.393

In the space of just a few millennia, the domestication of crops and livestock enabled bands of human hunter–gatherers to transform into the computerized, space-exploring societies of today. A predictable food supply ultimately turned out to be a great benefit, but it has remained unclear how the initial transitions to farming prevailed in the face of the inevitable infrastructural costs and vulnerability to disease1. Societies of fungus-growing ants and termites, and wood-boring ambrosia beetles, have also evolved advanced agriculture2; here, too, the absence of surviving lineages in which farming and non-farming co-occur make it difficult to evaluate how these transitions became irreversible. Brock et al. (page 393 of this issue)3 now add to the picture. Their demonstration that Dictyostelium slime moulds practise bacterial husbandry sheds light on the trade-offs governing incipient domestication.

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Figure 1: Stages in the life cycle of Dictyostelium discoideum.

CAROLINA BIOLOGICAL/VISUALS UNLIMITED/CORBIS D. SCHARF/SPL

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  1. Department of Biology, Jacobus J. (Koos) Boomsma is in the Centre for Social Evolution, University of Copenhagen, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark. jjboomsma@bio.ku.dk,

    Jacobus J. Boomsma

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Boomsma, J. Farming writ small. Nature 469, 308–309 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/469308a

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