The fungus has had a long day too so after the ant queen digs a deep enough hole, she spits out that little bit of fungus and starts to feed it! First she feeds it with her own eggs, but eventually, when she has laid other eggs that become worker ants in her colony, those baby ants will grow up to go out of the nest and cut leaves to feed the fungus. The ant queen will spend the whole rest of her life underground laying up to 20 eggs per minute!
Most leaf cutter ants are in South and Central America as well as Mexico and parts of the southern United States. They can have colonies (or big groups of individuals all very closely related) with millions of ants living in mounds, or ant hills, that stretch almost 100 feet (or three school busses) long! Atta laevigata ants are native to the northern parts of South America.
These ants are very important for the soil and for the forests where I am visiting here in Colombia. In some places, human farmers find them to be pesky because they cut leaves from crops the farmers are trying to grow. These ants help sustain big colonies of fungus underground by recycling nutrients from the leaves of plants above ground. They then eat the fungus and feed it to their young as well.
Many things can harm populations of Atta laevigata ants. Because they are seen as pests by many farmers, sometimes entire colonies are killed by farmers. Also, the ant princesses face a lot of dangers on their longest day.
