Ant Hill Wood

While visiting Marwell Zoo not far from my home, my wife decided to take photos of the Atta cephalotes colony. These are South American leaf cutter ants, and are not native to Britain. They require a special set up, with high humidity and tropical temperatures. Many zoos keep these ants, owing to their habit of cutting leaves, which are then taken into the nest as compost for their fungus gardens; this makes them highly educational.

Here I am observing the Atta colony in their large nesting tank at Marwell Zoo. A lady keeper my wife and I spoke to told us the colony had started off with just 1 queen and 40 workers. After just a few months, the colony is already producing soldiers, and has several hundreds; if not thousands of workers. Atta queens can produce thousands of eggs, and colonies in the wild can reach 2-3 million ants; though it will not get this large in a captive set up.

Atta ants feed from a specially cultivated fungus grown on the chewed up leaf pulp. They even rear their larvae on the stuff, and in the photo below (photo taken by my very good friend Heath Cope), we can see the ant brood being tended by nurse ant workers.

Again I really must thank my good friend Heath for taking this lovely photograph of an Atta cephalotes queen. She is such a beautiful lady to behold, and dwarfs her much smaller workers from the photos in the above paragraph!

As you can see, an Atta Queen dwarfs her worker daughters as she is much larger in size.

Here we can see the actual nest where the queen lives with her worker/soldier daughters. Just inside the nest entrance, you can see a white substance. This is part of the fungus garden. Worker ants bring back bits of cut up leaves, where they then chew them into a mulch on which they grow their fungus. This fungus produces small fleshy lumps, which the ants bite off and use as food ! This seems to be the main food source for the entire colony, and must provide a nutritious diet, as the ants thrive on it.

Atta ants will also eat fruit, as we can see from this photo taken by Heath of a worker chewing off a bit of grape. Note the small aphid just below the ant!

Atta cephalotes workers are excellent gardeners, and use their mandibles to cut up pieces of leaves, which are then carried back to make compost for their fungus gardens. A member of our Ant Hill World has made a lovely set up in which to keep these ants, and has very kindly given his permission for me to place just some of his excellent photos on my Leaf Cutter Gallery.

I would like to express my sincere thanks to Heath Cope, who I believe lives in the London area of England, for his friendship and generosity in sharing these photos with all you ant lovers out there. Cheers mate!

If you wish to see more of these great photos, and the really nice set up which Heath keeps his Atta colony in, then please come along and join our Ant Hill World forum @ http://queenant.proboards82.com/index.cgi

Thanks once more to my friend Heath Cope for this fabulous photo of an Atta cephalotes soldier. It shows the serrated jaws and large epinotal spines of this leaf cutting ant species really well.

Here is a single ant soldier, standing guard over the worker ants as they go about their leaf collecting. Soldiers do not cut leaves; but are used entirely for defensive purposes. They will not attack, unless something threatens the colony in any way.

Perhaps the best photo my wife took, was this one of major and minor workers in the foraging tank. A couple of soldier ants were hanging around,just in case they might be needed ?

Keeping a thriving colony of Atta ants needs a lot of patience, and the right kind of set up. In a zoo, they have the money to finance a large specialized tank and foraging areas for the ants to wander around in; but if you are limited to keeping these Leaf Cutter ants in your home, and you can afford the initial cash outlay, then you could try using a very large fish tank like my good friend Heath has done in his home. It will require heating and high humidity to some degree, plus making a seperate nest area away from the foraging grounds; but a certain amount of success can be achieved with keeping these incredible tropical ants, as Heath as shown from his great photos of them!

Here you can see his Atta tank set up, which I think he's done a wonderful job with and provided them with the necessary environment they require.