Not just any ants, we picked leafcutter ants. Leafcutter ants, as you might guess from their name, collect leaves. They use the leaves that they carry back to their nest to grow a fungus just like a farmer might grow tomatoes, or lettuce.
What do they do with the fungus? They eat it. You might be thinking yuck about now, but for leafcutter ants fungus is their food of choice.
Below is a picture of the special ant home we built. Worker ants : Most of the ants in a colony are female worker ants. These ants are all sisters, and spend their time doing almost all of the jobs that keep the colony going: collecting food, taking care of the garden, taking care of the young, and guarding the nest from intruders.
Queens : Queen ants usually have one main job: they lay all of the eggs that develop into all of the worker ants in the nest. They use the leaves to grow mushrooms, and then they eat the mushrooms. So the ants are actually farmers, like humans! Fungus food : What do the ants feed the fungus?
In our colonies, we give the ants leaves from green Palo brea trees. On top of that, we have also learned that the ants like to use cornmeal and oatmeal to grow the fungus. Brood larvae, pupae : All ants start out as eggs laid by the queen. The eggs hatch into larvae, which spend all of their time in the fungus garden, eating and growing bigger. Trash : Just like humans, ants produce trash as their colonies grow.
Leafcutter ants have lots of enemies in the jungle that want to eat or harm them. One of their largest threats comes from a tiny parasitic fly. The flies are much too small to eat the leafcutter ants, but they like to lay eggs on the heads of ants that are busy carrying leaves. In the colony, ants don't actually eat the leaves. Instead, the leaves are used to grow a fungus that can be eaten. Certain young ants called gardeners clean and take care of whole gardens of fungus.
The ants that keep the fungus gardens healthy also feed and care for the brood. Image by Rebecca Clark. The gardeners also work double duty as nurses. They care for the eggs, larvae, and pupae of the colony, collectively called brood. Leafcutter ant brood is found on and within tunnels of the fungal garden. Have you ever wondered what an ant nest looks like? Ant nests are made of many large, round chambers connected by small tunnels.
Leafcutter ants use different chamber types for specific tasks. These are like the different rooms in your house that are used for specific activities. The most important and numerous chambers are for the fungus gardens.
The brood develops into adult ants here. This is also where the queen lives. Leafcutter ants have garbage chambers, where dead workers, old food, and other trash is taken. All of these chambers are built by excavator ants. They are the architects and construction workers of the colony. They expand the nest as the colony grows. Large colonies can have hundreds of chambers that reach way down into the ground. Each chamber is dug out one mouthful at a time by tireless excavators.
A leafcutter's large mandibles let them collect leaves, but they also use them to remove trash from the colony and to dig tunnels.
Image by Yrichon. Would you want to live in a garbage dump? Probably not. Neither do leafcutter ants, but a leafcutter colony produces a lot of garbage. Things like dead ants, bad mold, and gross leaves build up in the colony and must be removed to prevent the spread of disease. Ants can get sick just like we can. They live very close together, so a disease can spread through a colony very quickly. Leafcutter excavators build large chambers deep below the rest of the nest.
Those chambers are the garbage dumps of the colony. However, not every ant visits the garbage chambers. There are special trash handling workers that transport dead and dirty items to the garbage chambers.
This work is very dangerous because the trash handling ants touch lots of different bacteria and mold that could infect and kill them. These ants work tirelessly day and night, traveling big distances from the nest to forage for leaves. They not only stay on or close the ground, but they will also even climb tree trunks into the rainforest canopy trees up to 30 meters tall!
While they may appear to defoliate an entire plant, cutting the leaves actually helps to stimulate leaf growth, just like pruning your garden plants! This way, the leafcutter ants ensure they will always have leaves to forage in all directions around their nest. So, they are not harming the plants, they are actually helping them grow!
Just another one of the amazing leafcutter ant facts out there! A leafcutter ant colony can contain up to 10 million individuals, consisting of a single queen, larvae, workers, and soldiers.
Next to humans, leafcutter ants are the most socially complex society on Earth! Leafcutter ants are polymorphic, which means individuals of the same species come in different sizes and forms. The queen ant is the largest ant in the colony, reaching 22 mm in length. She can lay up to 30, eggs per day! During the non-reproductive months, all leafcutter ants other than the queen in the colony are infertile females. Worker leafcutter ants come in different sizes, depending on the role they have in the colony.
Scientists categorize them into 4 general sizes: minims, minors, media, and majors. Did you know that there are workers that forage to collect leaves, tend the fungus gardens, brood larvae, remove parasites from leaves, take out the trash, and patrol and defend the terrain?
Depending on their role, they range in size from a head width of 1 mm to 7 mm, with the largest soldiers reaching 16 mm in length! Furthermore, the workers take initiative and decide the division of labor within the colony, rather than the queen delegating tasks.
But, what about the males? When it comes time to reproduce, reproductive individuals called alates —winged females and males—leave the colony and engage in nuptial flights. Each female takes a small amount of the fungus with her when she flies from the colony, and mates with multiple males to collect a large amount of sperm.
After mating, the male dies. The female will settle to the ground, lose her wings, and search for a suitable place to start her colony as a new queen.
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