The Museum is home to a bustling colony of leaf-cutter ants (Atta cephalotes, or simply Attas). Leaf-cutting is only the beginning — these ants carry bits of leaf back to special chambers in their colony. They shred the leaves and mix them with saliva then use the resulting mush to grow a fungus, earning them the nickname "gardener ants." Each species of Atta farms its own specific species of fungus. The fungus is the only food they eat, and it only lives in their colonies. Neither the ant nor the fungus can survive without the other.

In the wild, Atta colonies can stretch 120 square yards and house billions of ants. These subterranean nests contain hundreds of chambers dedicated to fungal gardens, burial chambers, and waste sites. Attas build colonies under the forest floor in the Central and South American tropics, and occasionally as far north as Texas. Our colonies come from the Durham sister community of San Ramon, Nicaragua.

Three kinds of ants live in the colony: workers, males and the queen. You will probably only see worker ants. They are all daughters of the queen. Workers fall into four groups. Small foragers collect leaves, large soldiers defend the fungus, medium-sized nurse/gardeners tend the fungus and larval ants, and generalists.

Males hatch from unfertilized eggs (fertilized eggs become workers). They have short lives and are rarely seen. They hatch, metamorphose from larva to adults, mate with the queen, and die.

The heart of the colony is the queen. She lives deep within the fungal mass, with her larvae. At about an inch long she is double the size of a worker ant. Queens can live for eighteen years (the one at the Museum hatched in 1999). Her only role is to lay eggs. When a queen dies, the colony will linger for several months but it cannot survive without her.