Interesting insects are all around us here in Panama. One of the hardest working is the leaf cutter ant. These guys can destroy a tree in a matter of hours by eating all of the leaves off of it.
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Today was the closing party for our summer camp at the Boys and Girls Club in Caizan, so we stayed after to have some fun with our friends who live there. We were sitting around and noticed that there were some ants hard at work devouring the leaves off of a hibiscus tree!
The ants will travel long distances in order to get leaves off of a plant or tree. What is funny is they will often pass many trees, plants and green grass on their way to another tree. They will do this so often, it wears a path in the dirt or grass.
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These ants are pretty amazing. They will take the leaves back to their nest and pile them up. The decaying leaves then make a fungus that the ants feed off of. They do not actually eat the leaves - they only eat the fungus, so they have to keep feeding the fungus more leaves so more fungus is produced.
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They can also carry a large amount of leaves as well as other ants. We have seen ants carrying a piece of a leaf with an ant on it also carrying another piece of a leaf! They can carry up to 20 times their body weight!
If you ever get a chance to sit and watch them work, I recommend it. They are pretty amazing creatures. If you try to follow them back to their nest, it will pretty much be impossible to track. You can see the lines they make in the ground, but they also dig underground and hide their path pretty well at spots. There are also millions of these guys working at one time - some going and some coming!
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