Fungal agriculture up to date: what else can we lern from how insects do farming?

The invention of agriculture is a revolutionary moment in the history of humankind that allowed a transition to sedentarism, the creation of urban settlements, and a titanic population explosion. We owe to such technology the complexity of our society, but humans are not the only farmers. Groups of highly social insects were growing fungal crops tens of millions of years before us. The most studied group of fungus-growing insects are Attini ants, but termites of the Macrotermitinae subfamily and ambrosia beetles have also selected nutritional mutualisms with fungi. Insects’ systems are described as multipartite symbiosis and many associated microbes show ecologically and technologically interesting traits. Traits such as the production of pesticide-like substances or antibiotics that prevent the attack of antagonists, the fertilization of crops by enrichment with nutrients, or the degradation of the recalcitrant substrate of the cultivar, have shown us that nature has developed the answer to the problems humans fight too and that we can learn from how insects do farming. Although there are important reviews about this topic, some of these publications are decades old and here we update the advances in the study of the microbiology of fungus-farming insects’ systems. We critically comment on gaps related to the functional necessity of some described associations and expose new described traits that can also be found in human agriculture. Finally, we highlight the unbalance between the discoveries in Attini ants and other groups of fungus-growing insects, and how it can be used to develop analogous studies.