If you live in warmer regions of America then you’ll be familiar with big, red ants working their way on roads and farms. They are called leaf cutter ants. These ants have very powerful jaws that vibrate thousand times a second which enable them to slice off leaves into many pieces.

Leaf cutter ants are different in size depending on the work they do. Like bees, they too have colonies which contain different workers. Some of the workers are soldier-leaf cutters that have amazingly strong jaws; strong enough to cut leather into pieces. Then there are gardener leaf cutters whose work is to process the leaves underground.

Leaf cutters build huge nests; they can sometimes stretch to 30 feet and at least 20 feet deep. These nests have many entrances which are hundreds of yards apart from each other. It’s estimated to house about 2-3 million ants in a single colony.

The nest has a queen who lays all the eggs and generates more worker ants for the colony. Leaf cutters may slice off pieces of leaves but they cannot consume them; instead they carry the pieces of leaves to the nest and use it as compost to cultivate fungus on which they thrive.

The fungus is supposed to be cultivated inside the nest as it cannot survive in the climate outside nor can it reproduce without the help of the ants. Apart from leaves the ants also collect other plant materials to use as composts but if they are toxic in nature then the fungus releases a chemical signal that stops the ants from collecting them.

How do Leaf cutter ants recognize their own colony or nests?

Since there are millions of leaf cutters wandering around to collect leaves away from their respective colonies or nests it is amazing how they keep a track of their own nests and return back to the place they came from.

They do this by leaving a scented trail of a substance known as pheromone. This substance is so strong that one gram of pheromone is enough to make an ant trail around the earth. That’s why each ant produces only one billionth of a gram.

It’s very clear why leaf cutters are called so. But they only cut leaves; they do not eat them. They are used to produce fungus on which the ants survive. This type of fungus is not found anywhere else in the world other than leaf cutter ants’ nest.