Pertanyaan

As a researcher, I'm especially intrigued by fungus-growing ants, a group of 248 species that cultivate fungi as their main source of food. They include 79 species of leafcutter ants, which grow their fungal gardens with freshly cut leaves they carry into their enormous underground nests. I've excavated hundreds of leafcutter ant nests from Texas to Argentina as part of the scientific effort to understand how these ants coevolved with their fungal crops. Much like human farmers, each species of fungus-growing ant is very particular about the type, of crops they cultivate. Most varieties descend from a type of fungus that the ancestors of fungusgrowing ants began growing some 55 million to 65 million years ago. Ant farmers face many of the same challenges human farmers do, including the threat of pests. A parasite called Escovopsis can devastate ant gardens, causing the ants to starve. Likewise in human agriculture, pest outbreaks have contributed to disasters like the Irish Potato Famine, the 1970 corn blight, and the current threat to bananas. Since the 1950s, human agriculture has become industrialized and relies on monoculture, or growing large amounts of the same variety of crop in a single place. Yet monoculture makes crops more vulnerable to pests because it is easier to destroy an entire field of genetically identical plants than a more diverse one. Industrial agriculture has looked to chemical pesticides as a partial solution, turning agricultural pest management into a billion-dollar industry. The trouble with this approach is that pests can evolve new ways to get around pesticides faster than researchers can develop more effective chemicals. It's an arms race-and the pests have the upper hand. Ants also grow their crops in monoculture and at a similar scale-after all, a leafcutter ant nest can be home to 5 million ants, all of which feed on the fungi in their underground gardens. They, too, use a pesticide to control Escovopsis and other pests. Yet, their approach to pesticide use differs from humans' in one important way. Ant pesticides are produced by bacteria they allow to grow in their nests, and in some cases even on their bodies. Keeping bacteria as a living culture allows the microbes to adapt in real time to evolutionary changes in the pests. In the arms race between pests and farmers, farming ants have discovered·that live bacteria can serve as pharmaceutical factories that can keep up with ever-changing pests. Whereas recent developments in agricultural pest management have focused on genetically engineering crop plants to produce their own pesticides, the lesson from 55 million years of ant agriculture is to leverage living microorganisms to make useful products. Researchers are currently experimenting with applying live bacteria to crop plants to determine if they are effective at producing pesticides that can evolve in real time along with pests. Adapted from: https://theconversation.com/ants-with-their-wise-farming-practices-and-efficient-nauigation-techniques-could-lnspire-so/utions-for-somehuman-probl~ms-188939 13. In the last sentence of Paragraph 5, the phrase "arms race" is used in order to indicate .... A. the never-ending problem to handle pests B. the competition of chemical pesticide products C. the competition of speed between the researchers and the pests D. the race in which ant farmers run quickly to attack pests the most E. the competition among farmers to get the most effective means to control pests

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