Agriculture involves a series of process that humans stumbled upon nearly 10,000 years ago. Far before then, other eukaryotes have enhanced their fitness through agricultural practices. So far, I have talked about my experience with fungal farming ants as well as the ambrosia beetles that tend to fungal gardens within the dead trees they inhabit. One fungal farming insect I haven’t mentioned are the termite specialists that grow immense patches of edible fungal mycelia, similar to the way leafcutter ants do. I had once thought that major criterion for acquiring an agricultural ecology was to be eusocial, mobile, and to have a brain. I then learned about solitary beetles that grow fungal gardens for their own nourishment, so I had to discard the eusocial criteria I once held. Just recently, I had to rethink the entire agricultural concept, upon reading a 2013 paper by Martin Pion and his team. Together, they describe how a single species of fungus maintain and use bacterial cultivars. Although Morchella crassipes is mobile on a much slower scale, these agricultural fungi lack brains, and like the solitary beetle farmers, lack a hierarchical society.

Using an intimating number of laboratory studies (9), these researchers began to unfold this novel ecological interaction. Together, they grew Morchella crassipes with two strains of Pseudomonas putida. One bacterial strain was the flagellated wild type, which in nature utilizes mycelial networks to navigate its soil habitat. The other was a mutant strain without flagella, to test how important bacterial locomotion is in this agricultural system. Morchella crassipes was used in this study because it supposedly forms an intimate, mycorrhizal relationship with trees, so, a larger ecological picture could be more comprehensively understood. Also, M. crassipes forms sclerotia, or fungal storage tissue that become utilized upon fungal stress.