Thread by @DrAdrianSmith

It’s 2:30pm on a Tuesday. That means it’s time to stop & think about how crazy leafcutter ants are!

Ready?

Let’s start by just watching these Atta cephalotes cut up this leaf. Wow. Nice work ants.

Why are they cutting that leaf? To feed to this glorious fungus garden inside their nest!

Has an obligate symbiotic clump of fungus ever looked this good? If ants could subscribe to Bon Appétit, this would be on the cover. Again, nice work ants.

At maturity, those gardens support colonies of 1-8 million ants. They keep their gardens growing by harvesting 100,000s of leaf fragments per day!

Atta workers are leaf-cutting machines. Cutting is a process of chomping & biting along a leaf with 1 mandible inorder to pull a second, stationary mandible through the leaf tissue. The cutting teeth are reinforced with 16% zinc, compared to 0.08% for the rest of the jaw.

Here’s what cutting looks like from underneath! I thought you might be curious, so I spent hours of my life getting this shot for you. You’re welcome.

50% of the weight of their head is muscle powering those leaf-cutting mandibles. That’s 25% of their TOTAL bodyweight! (Thx @bugbiter for these cool microCT images)

@bugbiter OK, there are 1,000,000 other crazy things about leafcutter ants (e.g. they use antibiotics, they’re only the tip of fungus-farming ant diversity, etc.) beyond this.

You should add your cool leafcutter/fungus-farming ant experiences & factoids to this thread!

@bugbiter Check out more of the story along with these clips in my new Ant Lab video:

It’s my contribution to the #TeamTrees campaign . I also donated 100% of my LIFETIME YouTube AdSense revenue. $178 for 178 trees via the Arbor Day Foundation. Now it’s your turn.