Size: Ranging from 2mm – 15mm depending on their role.

Habitat and Distribution: Found in wet or dry forest habitats in clearings and forest edges of southern Mexico and Costa Rica down to Brazil and Bolivia.

Age: The founder queen can live more than fifteen years; however, most new colonies don’t survive beyond 3 years.

Groups and Breeding: The family system of the leafcutter ant is very complex containing seven different castes. Each ant has a specific role in maintaining the nest. The largest ants are the soldiers, whose role it is to go on trails, watch for predators and to stand guard at the nest entrance. Media workers do the majority of the leaf cutting and transporting and also help to guard the nest. The smallest and probably the most important are the minimas (or minims). These ants distribute the food and harvest the fungus garden. Some minima ants go on the trails by riding on top of a larger worker. As with all ants, the workers are all female. Finally the queen is responsible for laying eggs and increasing the population size; she is the only reproductive female in the colony.

Mature colonies will produce winged reproductive ants, being young (female) queens and (male) drones. The process of mating in ants requires a nuptial flight, which involves the mating of winged ant queens and drones. This occurs at dawn and will coincide with the nuptial flights of all the other colonies in the area. When a queen is ready to fly she takes off into the sky to be impregnated. After a male inseminates her, his job is done and he will die. The female will then fly to earth where her wings fall off. When she has found the perfect spot to start a new colony, she will dig into the earth and release a small portion of the symbiotic fungus that she brought from her last colony, from which her colony’s future fungus garden can originate.

A female will work tirelessly to bring up her young. She grows the fungus to feed the colony using her own faeces (poo), and feeds the first batch of larvae with her own eggs. It takes up to 35 days for eggs to hatch, the first batch measure 5.5mm and from then on they take over the larvae-tending duties, leaving the queen to lay eggs.

Diet: As you might expect, leaf cutter ants cut the leaves of trees. However, they do not actually eat these. Smaller worker ants cut the leaf pieces into yet smaller fragments of around 1mm in size. These are then mixed with saliva to form a pellet and placed into a ‘garden’. These pellets and the leaf sap they contain act as food for a fungus which is what the ants actually eat.

• Young colonies typically have only a few nest mounds, with foraging holes opening several meters away from the mounds, and sometimes neighbouring colonies may fuse together to form one large mound. In this case, the central nest mound may be 30 metres in diameter, with many smaller mounds extending out a further 80 metres, so in total it may cover up to 600 square meters! Furthermore, the underground chambers may extend downwards another 6 metres in depth.
• A colony can be made up of 8 million individuals.
• Minims riding on the back of media workers guard the workers by altering them if they spot parasitic phorid flies, which survive by dropping their maggots onto passing ants.
• Leaf-cutting ants can carry loads weighing up to twelve times their own weight. Usually, they carry loads only two to four times their own weight.
• Leaf-cutters often cut leaves fifty to one hundred meters away from their nest. Each round-trip to a tree may take an ant several hours.
• Some scientists believe that the leafcutter ant has been growing the same symbiotic fungus for 25 million years.
• The huge size and population of the ant colonies mean that ingenious solutions have been formed to deal with potential problems such as excess CO2 and waste. In the first place, elaborate ventilation systems have been formed by the ants to allow wind and clean air to circulate. Secondly, some of the workers in a colony are devoted to dealing with waste material (dead ants, fungus and faeces) and will transport it to a large chamber away from the rest which is far from the nests and is used exclusively for waste.