Worker ants: Most of the ants in a colony are female worker ants. These ants are all sisters, and spend their time doing almost all of the jobs that keep the colony going: collecting food, taking care of the garden, taking care of the young, and guarding the nest from intruders.

Queens: Queen ants usually have one main job: they lay all of the eggs that develop into all of the worker ants in the nest. Queens spend most of their time hiding deep inside of the nest, out of harm’s way.

Fungus: Leafcutter ants don’t actually eat the leaves that they harvest. They use the leaves to grow mushrooms, and then they eat the mushrooms. So the ants are actually farmers, like humans!

Fungus food: What do the ants feed the fungus? In our colonies, we give the ants leaves from green Palo brea trees. On top of that, we have also learned that the ants like to use cornmeal and oatmeal to grow the fungus.

Brood (larvae, pupae): All ants start out as eggs laid by the queen. The eggs hatch into larvae, which spend all of their time in the fungus garden, eating and growing bigger. After they’ve gotten big enough, they turn into pupae and undergo metamorphosis, like butterflies, and then emerge as adult ants.

Trash: Just like humans, ants produce trash as their colonies grow. The ants are very good at keeping their nest tidy by throwing out their trash into a trash pile.

Where are the male ants?
Male ants actually don’t do very much in the colony: they are raised by their sisters, and when they become adults they wait until the conditions are just right and then they leave the nest to mate with queens. When colonies aren’t getting ready to reproduce, there won’t be any male ants around at all! Here you see a male and a queen mating. 

Foraging arenas: The major goal of ant foragers is to find food. In the lab, they can find it in these arenas that we set up. After the foragers find vegetation, they start chewing leaves off to carry back to the fungus gardens.