Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 19, 2025
This is what hundreds of leaf-cutting ants accomplish daily, when cutting leaves from a tall bush, at the foot of the bank near the laboratory. The Army Ants are carnivorous, predatory, militant nomads; the Termites are vegetarian scavengers, sedentary, negative and provincial; the Attas, or leaf-cutting ants, are vegetarians, active and dominant, and in many ways the most interesting of all.
For a long time there was considerable doubt as to the use to which the leaf-cutting ants put the leaves; some naturalists supposed they are used directly as food, others that the ants roof their underground dwellings with them.
Although essentially a tropical family, Attas have pushed as far north as New Jersey, where they make a tiny nest, a few inches across, and bring to it bits of pine needles. In a jungle Baedeker, we should double-star these insects, and paragraph them as "Atta, named by Fabricius in 1804; the Kartabo species, cephalotes; Leaf-cutting or Cushie or Parasol Ants; very abundant.
These were filled with what looked like soft grayish sponge covered with whitish mold, and these somber affairs were the raison d'être for all the leaf-cutting, the trails, the struggles through jungles, the constant battling against wind and rain and sun. But the labors of the Attas are only renewed when a worker disappears down a hole with his hard-earned bit of leaf.
I have no doubt that the primary object of these honey-glands is to attract the ants, and keep them about the most tender and vulnerable parts of the plant, to prevent them being injured; and I further believe that one of the principal enemies that they serve to guard against in tropical America is the leaf-cutting ant, as I have observed that the latter are very much afraid of the small black ants.
In many species of ants there are two, and in the leaf-cutting ants of Brazil there are three, kinds of neuters which differ from each other and from their male and female ancestors "to an almost incredible degree." The soldier caste is distinguished from the workers by enormously large heads, very powerful mandibles, and "extraordinarily different" instincts.
"They are called leaf-cutting ants, and each one of them is really carrying a leaf he has cut from some tree." On closer inspection the boys saw that this was so. Each ant carried on its back a triangular leaf, and the odd part, or, rather, one of the odd features, was that the leaf was carried with the thin edge forward, so it would not blow in the wind. "What do they do with 'em?" asked Joe.
What would be the result if man were withdrawn from the scene, I do not know, but I believe that the forest would slowly, but surely, regain the ground that it has lost through long centuries. The thickets and dense brushwood that always spring up along the edge of the forest, and consist of many shrubs that the leaf-cutting ants do not touch, would gradually spread, and beat back the grass.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking