While I was heading home from Vermont, I stopped in at a science museum, the Montshire Museum of Science, to check out this colony of leafcutter ants. Leafcutter ants are a very unique type of ant belonging to the genera Acromyrmex and Atta.
After checking in to the museum, I proceeded straight to the leafcutter’s setup.
The caretaker of this colony has quite a busy job, as the ants need to be fed every single day. the leaves that she provides are taken from trees around the outside of the museum, and the ants love these leaves. before the leaves are fed to the ants, they are kept in a refrigerator, preventing them from spoiling and becoming inedible for the ants.
Once a suitable leaf has been found, workers swarm over it, searching for areas where they can start carving up the leaf.
When a worker has found an appropriate spot on the leaf, she digs in her mandibles, using them like a hyper-miniaturized guillotine to cut out a piece of the leaf. Conveniently, the larger workers cut larger arcs in the leaf, resulting in a genius system to ensure that larger ants always carry greater loads than smaller workers.
As the leaf-bearing ants start their journey home, very tiny workers hitch a ride on the leaf pieces. This has nothing to do with convenience, instead, these tiny ants defend the carrier against parasitic flies who try laying eggs on the otherwise defenseless workers. To defend against larger threats, however, the colony relies on its soldiers, who have oversized heads that are full of muscles that control a set of huge jaws. These jaws are built for just a single purpose: killing enemies. A mature colony can have thousands of these soldiers, ready to defend the colony to the death against a threat.
After each worker cuts a leaf hunk, she proceeds to a very long tube, which leads directly to the nest. This tube runs all the way across one side of the setup, taking the most direct route to the nest possible from the outworld.
Between the nest and the outworld are the various dump chambers, which are garbage bins where the ants dump exhausted leaf substrate and dead bodies. The waste and dead bodies decay in these chambers, becoming soil. This particular colony has access to several such dump chambers, a couple of which have been completely filled up. Fortunately, there are more dumps that haven’t begun to fill up.
After a very long tube, the leaf-bearing ants arrive at the nest entrance, where they deposit the leaf pieces. there, smaller ants take over, gradually mashing the leaf until it is a kind of pulp. This pulp is then inserted into the fungus garden, where new fungus will grow from the substrate.
Inside the main nest box, several tree branches act as scaffolding for the ants to build their titanic fungus ball. This ball of fungus is what the ants actually eat, not the leaves they cut up. Because of this, leafcutter ants are often called, “The farmers of the ant world.”
The image directly above displays the leafcutter’s massive fungus garden. Inside of this garden is a huge amount of brood, though very little of the brood is ever visible. Also inside of this living nursery is the all-important queen, who is absolutely gigantic compared to her workers. The exhibit also has a life-size model of the queen, so you know what to expect if you spot her. Personally, I did not spot her, but I knew that the chance of me spotting her was extremely slim, as she was last seen on March tenth, 2020, just a few days before the pandemic shutdown, which was roughly eighteen months ago.
