Our story started a long time ago, when wheat, barley grass and lentils seeds first grew favouring a newborn agriculture. A long time ago, in ancients times, there were hands touching seeds,there were dark and big hands.
Stop. Rewind
Our story started three million years ago, when those seeds were nurtured for the first time. There are no hands to get dirty with soil making furrows, sheltering seeds, keepers of life. There are only small dark legs. They were ants and their small legs the first to invent one of the most exclusively human activities : the agriculture. A group of researchers at Monk University, in Germany, discovered that this small little animal (Philidris nagasaus) has the incredible ability to cultivate six plants of Squamellaria.
First of all they extract seeds from fruits, they place them in the cracks of trees on which these seedlings live (they are known as ‘epifite’ because they don’t touch the ground but they grow on trees). The plant buds and conquers space in the trunk, creating small rooms and spaces that the ants frequent and enrich. The plant grows, the rooms become larger and larger and the ants create stable colonies, as small towns protected by the Squamellaria.
We are much more similar and connected than we think. An example? There is a valid law for any living things, both plants and animal, that mathematically manages the relationship between the speed of their metabolism and mass.
At the end the heartbeats are the same both for an owl and for a man. If we will discover that also the plants have a beating ‘heart’ , we will understand that everything has a same rhythm.
And the ants cultivate as we do.
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