Inside the Scramble to Make a Half-Million Ants Feel at Home
When the American Museum of Natural History’s new insectarium opens on May 4, a half-million leafcutter ants will share the title of star attraction.
The ants are biological marvels, living in enormous colonies that function as a single superorganism. They are sophisticated farmers, collecting leaves that they use to nurture sprawling fungal gardens, which provide food for the colony.
Creating the new leafcutter exhibit was a six-year journey that took the museum’s team — and the ants — from a farm in Trinidad, where the tangerine-size colony was collected, to a lab in Oregon, where it grew large enough to fill a bathtub, and then on a six-day drive across the country in a U-Haul van.
And that wasn’t even the hard part. The ants, which moved into their museum habitat in January, were slow to adjust to their new home, failing to harvest enough leaves to sustain their fungal gardens.
Source: The New York Times
