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Leaf cutter ants live in giant colonies beneath the rainforest floor. Five to eight million ants live in one colony.
- Like all other
insects, ants have six legs, two antennas, and an exoskeleton. Their bodies have three parts: head, thorax and abdomen.
- Leaf cutter
queens fly away from their homes and start new colonies by laying lots of eggs. Queens are served by workers: drones, leaf cutters, foragers, gardeners, and soldiers.
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Drones are the only males in the colony. Their work is to mate with the queen.
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Leaf cutters spend most of their time in rainforest trees. They clip leaves into small pieces with their strong jaws (mandibles).
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Foragers haul these leaf pieces back to the colony. They carry pieces that weigh 30 times more than they do. For a human being, this would be like carrying a bulldozer!
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Gardeners lick leaf pieces clean, grind them up, and deposit dung in the powder. Ant dung contains fungus spores (seeds), which sprout in this leaf litter.
- Leaf cutters eat
fungus because they cannot digest plants. A fungus is a simple living thing that breaks down plant litter into starch and sugar. Examples of fungus are mushrooms and mold.
- The cooperation between leaf cutter ants and fungus is called
symbiosis. This word means "living together."
- The grass that a
cow eats in a day weighs as much as the leaves that a colony feeds to its fungus.
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Soldiers, the largest workers, defend their colonies from attack by other ants. Their jaws are strong enough to cut leather. Rainforest Indians used soldier ants to stitch wounds together. They let the ant bite both sides of a cut, then snipped its body off leaving the head behind.
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Lots of animals eat ants--for example, spiders, ant lions, frogs, toads, and birds. Anteaters use their long, sticky tongues to lick ants out of their burrows. They swallow thousands at a time.
- Some
people in Mexico eat ants, which are a good source of protein.
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