So,
Given that a few things affect species’ evolution, such as geography, resource abundance, interaction with or isolation from other species and how fast they reproduce (and lifespans) just to name the ones I can remember off the top of my head. And given that ant farms normally are fitting to isolation, fast breeding, resource abundance and (I’d assume), mutations are happening at any given population, in ant farms or not.. how come we don’t have specific species of ants that are only domesticated? Or do we and I just don’t know about?
Would it be possible to do selective breeding of ants as we (as a civilization) have done with dogs and other domesticated fauna? Could I create a glow-in-the-dark variation of fire ants that have no other purpose aside from glowing in the dark?
Comments
Ant farms are not isolated.
When talking about evolution isolation means they stay isolated in an unbroken chain.
Ant farms are not populated exclusively by other ant farms.
People pick and chose well known wild species of ants for their farms.
My guess would be that if you had an ant farm that existed for 100’s or 1000’s of generations, you would get small changes to them. Since they would have no predators, anti predation techniques would go away, but you wouldn’t likely know it, because with no predator for them to deal with would appear for you to see the affect.
If you kept them in bright light for years for instance, they likely would evolve to work in bright light better and if you suddenly put them back in the dark, they could very possibly fail as a colony.
But things like this take a very long time, many, many, many generations.