Barro Colorado Island, Panama
Leaf cutter ants at Barro Colorado
In places, the forest floor appeared to be alive, a moving carpet of green. This hallucination was brought about by the streams of leaf-cutting ants hurrying back to their nests with their booty, a triangular piece of thumbnail-sized green leaf, slung over their shoulders. From the tree of their choice ( which they were busily dissecting ) to the nest may be several hundred yards, and so these columns of green wend their way over the dark forest floor, over logs and under bushes in a steady stream that on close inspection looks like a Lilliputian regatta, all the boats having green sails.
...
We moved on into the forest, stepping carefully over the columns of leaf-cutters. So numerous were they that you wondered why the whole forest was not defoliated. This leaf-gathering is really a form of gardening, for the ants carry the leaves to their vast underground homes ( sometimes a quarter of an acre in extent ) and here they rot the leaves down into a mulch on which they grow the fungi which is their food.
Leaf cutter ants with flower petals, Barro Colorado
Although we had miles of film of the leaf-cutting ants going about the business of defoliating the forest, carrying their leaves back to their nest, cleaning out the nest and creating huge garbage-heaps, we had to part company with them when they vanished underground. This irked Alastair.
'I want ... you know ... I think ... well, gardens,' he said with his head on one side, revolving slowly, looking a beaming, benevolent corpse on a gibbet. 'Mushroom-beds, you know ... underground?'
' The only way you'll get them, honey, is by digging the guys out,' said Paula practically.
...
He and Roger seized spades and started to dig. Having had some experience of leaf-cutting ants, I took Lee and Paula by the arm and led them away from the scene of operations.
Leaf cutter ants' fungal garden, Barro Colorado
...approximately half the million inhabitants of this nest decided that the activities of Roger and Alastair were inimical to their well-being, so they poured forth to remonstrate. One minute Alastair and Roger looked like two earnest gardeners turning over their asparagus-beds in preparation for a new crop and the next minute they were executing leaps and twists and pas de deux that would have been the envy of the Moscow Ballet. This was accompanied by wild, tremulous screams of agony, interspersed in equal parts with blasphemy and procreative oaths.
...
The chief problem was that Alastair was wearing shorts and an ancient pair of baseball boots, and this did not give his legs any protection, so the ants swarmed up him as though he were a tree, attempting to tear him to pieces. Roger, if anything, was in worse case, for he was wearing elegant, fairly tight-fitting trousers, up which the ants flowed with speed and precision. Those on the outside bit right through the thin cloth and into his flesh. Those on the inside concentrated on getting as high as possible before beginning their assault, so that Roger was being bitten in the most intimate and tender parts of his anatomy.
...
'Did you see that?' panted Alastair, his spectacles misted over with emotion. ' The buggers were trying to defoliate me.'
'What about me?' said Roger. 'Me they go for the private parts. Me they try to make eunuch.'