|
Ambitious Ants in Our Jungle
When you visit the jungle, you will get to see lots of insects. There are literally thousands of different bugs that crawl, fly, hop and generally dominate the rainforest.
One of the most prominent is the leaf cutter ant, which clears neat paths from its colony to the areas where it collects its leaves. These paths are often littered with discarded leaf fragments and can stretch a half mile or more.
There are many species of leaf cutter ants, but all make underground colonies that can reach the size of a living room. The red colored colonies are made from earth while black ones are made from partially chewed twig fragments.
Anywhere from one million to 2.5 million workers live inside a leaf cutter colony, divided into five castes:
- The queen or egg-layer
- Male reproducers who fertilize the queen
- Leaf cutters, who chew and transport the leaves
- Leaf travelers, who remove the waxy cuticle from the leaf and protect the treasure from parasitic phoridae flies,
- Cultivators, who tend and fertilize a fungus that grows on the leaves.
Biologists believe that these leaf cutters are responsible for nearly half of all herbivore consumption in the Neotropics, but the ants do not actually eat the leaves. Instead they pile them up inside their colony to cultivate a fungus which occurs only in leaf cutting colonies and is the ant's only food source. The ant and fungus rely on each other for survival, an example of how specific and complex rain forest symbiosis can be. (Moon Handbook Peru).
<< Back
|
