Leaf Cutter ants are abundant in the Belize Jungle. You will no doubt see these every evening here at Jaguar Paw. These are fascinating insects!

During the evening they are easily recognized by their foraging columns composed of hundreds or thousands of ants carrying small pieces of leaves. These moving trails of cut foliage often stretch over 30 meters (100 feet) across the forest floor and up and down the trunks of canopy trees.

   

After clipping out pieces of leaves with their jaws, the fragments are transported to an underground nest that can include over 1,000 chambers and house millions of individual ants.

Leaf cutter ants grow their fungus cultures on a substrate made of ground up plant matter, which they obtain by harvesting prodigious amounts of leaves, petals, and various other plant parts from the vegetation surrounding the nest. When an ant scout finds a suitable bush or tree, it lays a scent trail back to the nest and summons the foragers. These medium sized ants (head widths of around 2 mm) cut out pieces of leaves and head clumsily back to the nest. All around them smaller ants weave to and fro, constantly scanning the surrounding terrain for danger.

Leaf cutter ants are limited to the arid, semi-tropical and tropical regions of South, Central, and North America, but they are one of the ecologically-dominant ants everywhere they are found. They are arguably the most well-known of the ants to the local people and foreign tourists in these regions, mainly because of their spectacular habit of carrying colored petals or green leaves in foraging lines that may stretch more than 250 meters from their nest!

FACT: Leafcutter ants profoundly affect their surroundings. By pruning vegetation, they stimulate new plant growth; by gardening their fungal food, they enrich the soil. Excavating nests that may occupy 23 cubic meters (800 cubic feet), a colony of some leafcutter species may turn over 40,000 kg (88,000 pounds) of soil in tropical moist forests, stimulating root growth of many plant species. In Belize tropical rainforests, the large nests of these ants are often found among large trees that are spaced far apart with little undergrowth in a park like setting created by the ants themselves. Many leafcutter species clear ant highways radiating out from the nest, along which wide columns of their kind can march unhindered.

Leaf cutter ants have one of the most sophisticated animal societies in the world. This is because of their unusual method of farming (they are the only animal besides humans who grow their own food from living matter), their extremely large colony sizes (up to 8 million individuals per colony).