Wildlife
The farmers of the insect world, leaf-cutter ants grow their own food in underground fungus farms. Pieces of leaf are carried hundreds of metres in impressive processions, with each ant carrying a piece up to 50 times its own body weight. That's like one of us carrying a medium-sized van. The leaves are used to create fungus gardens that feed the whole colony - millions and millions of ants. Soldiers protect the huge nest and the irreplaceable queen at all costs, as Sir David Attenborough discovered while delivering a piece to camera from the top of an ant nest for Trials of Life.
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Farmer ants
The Argentinian Pampas grassland has almost been solely created by grasscutter ants.
The landscape and vegetation of the Argentinian Pampas grassland has almost been solely created by grasscutter ants.
Taking out litter
Infra-red footage of leaf cutter ants cleaning their nest at night.
Infra-red footage of leaf cutter ants cleaning their nest at night.
Fungus gardeners
Grass-cutting ants carefully cultivate the fungus they feed on.
Grass-cutting ants carefully cultivate the fungus they feed on.
Ant stitch-up
Soldier leafcutter ants have such a strong bite, local people use it as natural surgery.
Soldier leafcutter ants have such a strong bite, local people use it as natural surgery.
Super-organism
A fixed caste system turns millions of leaf-cutter ants into superbly efficient colonies.
Leaf-cutter ants are the major forest herbivores in Central America and consume more plant matter than all the vertebrate herbivores put together. Their subterranean nests can be vast and home to many millions of ants and they have a really neat defence system where minor workers ride shotgun on top of the leaf loads carried by the major workers and fend off the attacks of parasitic flies.' (George McGavin, on his love for leaf-cutters.)
The Leaf-cutter ants can be found in a number of locations including: Amazon Rainforest, North America, South America. Find out more about these places and what else lives there.
The following habitats are found across the Leaf-cutter ants distribution range. Find out more about these environments, what it takes to live there and what else inhabits them.
Discover what these behaviours are and how different plants and animals use them.
Additional data source: Animal Diversity Web
Atta is a genus of New World ants of the subfamily Myrmicinae. It contains at least 16 known species.
Leaf-cutter ants are relatively large, rusty red or brown in colour, and have a spiny body and long legs. The three main castes within a nest are the queen, worker and soldier. Only the queens have wings, and these ants are also known as 'reproductives' or 'swarmers'. Although most of the ants in the nest are female, only the queens produce eggs. Queens are usually over 20mm long.
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Take a trip through the natural world with our themed collections of video clips from the natural history archive.
George's marvellous minibeasts
A video collection featuring bugs and insects in amazing close up selected by insect expert and TV presenter George McGavin, with Goliath spiders, killer centipedes, ants and moths.
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Predation defence
Eusocial
Tactile sense
Herbivorous
Metamorphosis
Egg layer
Polymorphism
Chemical communication