Leafcutter Ant Morning

You walk over to the leafcutter ant colony and watch the trails for a moment, just to see how busy they are today.

Leafcutter ant carrying a leaf fragment along a white railing.
A leafcutter ant carrying a piece of leaf along the trail.

Thankfully, it’s not a difficult ant day. The fungus garden looks stable, and the workers are moving in steady lines along the branches.

Leafcutter ant fungus garden inside a glass nest.
The fungus garden inside the glass nest, busy with workers.

You carefully remove the pieces of bramble that are old, crinkly, or have already been stripped of leaves. Each dried stem comes out slowly so you don’t disturb the trails too much.

Then you replace them with fresh bramble, full of crisp green leaves. Almost immediately, the ants find the new branches and start cutting, carrying, and sorting tiny leaf pieces deeper into the nest.

Rows of plants grown for the leafcutter ant colony.
Fresh plants grown just for the leafcutter ants to harvest.

It’s oddly satisfying to watch the organized chaos settle back into a smooth flow of work. The colony hums along, and you feel like you’ve helped everything run just a little bit better.

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All photos in this project were taken by me at the American Museum of Natural History.