More Leaf-Cutter Ants

dear antboy –

i saw ur blog entry on leaf-cutter ant’s and that pictrue u put up waz teh suxx0rz. it was all blury cant u do better? u sed their were like millions of them u should find 1 thats in focus. also i hear u often smell bad and r shockingly hairy for some1 who cant grow a full beard.

lol,
some1 i made up

I have to say you’re remarkably critical of photography for someone who plays pretty loose and fast with the whole plural/possessive thing. Nevertheless, I can handle criticism and, yes, I admit that photo of the leaf-cutter ants in my first post was not my finest work. However, totally coincidentally, it just so happens that yesterday when I was up in a tree I brought down some of the nice young leaves and left them there overnight. When I came back today, a trail of leaf-cutter ants had found them and started taking bits of them back for food, so I decided I’d go ahead and get some better photos of leaf-cutter ants.

Here a worker of the species Atta cephalotes has just about finished cutting out a nice piece of leaf in a manageable size to carry back to her nest. The leaf-cutter ants have sharp, toothed mandibles that they use like a saw to cut out regions of leaves:

Here’s an even closer look:

Once she’s cut out a nice piece she’ll pick it up

and then carry it back to her nest, where it will be decomposed by the nest fungus, which will in turn be eaten by the ants.

So there you go.  I hope you’re satisfied by these sharper photos. For my other more well-heeled readers, I in no way intend for this response to stand as indication that abusive question-asking will get photos taken specially just for you. Asking nicely will work just fine; I just felt I should go to the trouble of answering this one particular piece of mail since I had gone to all of the trouble of inventing its author.