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My Dream Ant Farm: Leafcutter Ants

Guys, behold the ant-keeping pièce de résistance.

What you are looking at here is the dream setup and species of nearly every pro ant hobbyist in the world!

Trust me!

We absolutely drool over this ant farm setup!

So this week, I wanted to take a short break from our regularly scheduled ant soap opera of our cherished ants in the Philippines and take a trip all the way to Montreal, Canada, so we could completely nerd out at one of the most impressive captive ant setups I have ever seen.

What you’re about to see in this week’s video is the dream ant setup nearly every single ant nerd on the planet, like myself, has dreamed of having, and I can’t wait to explain why in perfect ant nerd fashion, as we tour the Espace Pour La Vie Montreal Insectarium’s leaf-cutter ant exhibit and talk about what makes these fungus-farming ants some of the most biotechnologically advanced organisms on the planet.

You won’t want to miss all the epic ant discovery ahead, so keep on watching until the end!

AC Family, gather around to ant watch and completely geek out with me!

On this episode of the AntsCanada Ant Channel.

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Welcome to the AC Family.

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Enjoy!

I’m currently back in Canada for a work trip, and my travels took me to the gorgeous French Canadian city of Montreal, which happens to house one of my favorite spots in the entire country: the Insectarium.

Entering the building, you find a ton of insect exhibits, but of course, my favorite was this.

AC Family, welcome to the Atta exhibit, an impressive 7-year-old colony of leaf-cutter ants.

Now if you’re new to leafcutter ants, let me tell you, these ants are some of the most mind-blowing ants ever!

Last year, we covered them in an episode featuring a desert species of leafcutter ants, which I highly recommend you watch after this video, but these girls are a tropical species of leafcutters from South America.

These ants, belonging to the genus Atta, are called leafcutter ants because of how they cut up pieces of leaves and use them to feed their underground fungus gardens, which they eat.

That’s right, these ants farm microscopic mushrooms for a living.

Now check out how brilliant this setup is!

Let’s take a tour, shall we?

Here is the main nesting basin. Inside it are clear acrylic containers, which simulate underground chambers for the ants, and inside each one of those containers are the gorgeous fungal gardens.

Yes, those grayish honeycomb-looking things are the ants’ giant fungus balls, which they tend and care for very meticulously.

You see, these ants must ensure that these fungus crops remain healthy and continue to thrive because, without them, the entire ant colony would die. But more about that mind-blowing activity later.

Each acrylic container has an opening to which a stick is affixed in order for the leafcutter ants to climb so they can drag their cut-up pieces of leaves into the chambers.

Inside each of these chambers is a plaster floor, which helps keep the inside nice and humid, necessary for the ants and the fungal gardens to survive.

In the wild, these ants create deep chambers to house their massive fungal balls, but they will also be opportunistic, as seen in this setup, and occupy any readily available space with ideal conditions.

I was once in Mexico and watched an Atta colony bringing leaves deep into a sewer.

It seems these ants are resourceful and willing to use whatever’s available in order to survive.

Now let’s move backward and see where the ants are getting all these pieces of leaves, the food for their fungus.

Traveling up this trunk base, and up this wooden branch, and down this neat entanglement of branches, we come to the source of their fungus food.

At the other end of their setup, the ants reach an assortment of various leaves and hibiscus flowers.

Leafcutter ants don’t accept all kinds of foliage, but amazingly the ants seem to know which plant matter would best nourish their fungus, aka their food, and it’s those that the ants cut up and bring home.

Isn’t that just amazing, AC Family?

It seems the ants and their fungus have a mutual understanding. Perhaps psychically bonded?

Well, let’s leave that for another video!

The leaves and flowers are kept fresh by way of water picks hidden strategically around the branch entanglement.

Also available to the ants are rolled oats, which the ants also seem to love—or should I say, their fungus seems to love.

Now you may notice that this setup is glassless, so you may be asking what is keeping the ants from escaping into the museum.

Well, a thick band of this stuff called fluon painted across all vertical surfaces of the basins is super slippery for the ants and it keeps them from climbing out of the setup.

Each basin is also surrounded by a moat of water for extra security.

Any ants traveling across the branches that might slip and fall also fall into a basin secured with fluon and surrounded by a moat.

Now this leaf-cutter ant colony is 7 years old and contains one egg-laying queen living somewhere in one of these acrylic containers.

She is large and apparently is seen sometimes emerging to switch containers but is always surrounded by a massive ball of workers protecting her.

I love watching the ants traveling back and forth carrying their pieces of cut-up leaves, flowers, and oats back to the nest.

It is just so entrancing and fascinating watching the ants work tirelessly.

I could literally be here for hours.

How about you guys?

Let’s watch them for a bit.

Speaking of ant watching, one of the coolest parts of this ant setup is the fixation of a webcam right here, which projects the ants working onto a screen so you could watch the ants around the clock.

Not sure if at one point this was streamed online, but it gave me an idea.

AC Family, if I managed to hook up a 24-hour stream of my ants back in Manila, would you tune in to watch?

Which colony would you like to see a stream of?

Let me know in the comments section and perhaps we just might make it happen.

Now I feel the reason ant-keeping as a hobby is so appealing is because of how much ants are like humans, and in my books, these leafcutter ants are some of the most human-like ants around.

They’re farmers, for goodness’ sake!

And not only that, they’ve been farming for millions and millions of years on this planet, way before humans ever appeared on Earth.

There are even fossils of leafcutter ants as far back as 20 million years ago.

And speaking of human-like, check out their massive pile of garbage.

Yes, that orange hill is the colony’s garbage.

Certainly! Here is the continuation of the transcription, corrected for spelling and aligned sentences while retaining original words:

Alright, so here is the portion of the video where we’re about to completely geek out—yes, more than we already have.

So are you ready to hear what makes these ants so incredible in the biological world?

Prepare to be mind-blown, AC Family!

Okay, get this: these ants grow their fungus, which they eat, right?

But believe it or not, like humans, the ants have to deal with weeds—bad fungus which feeds on their good fungus.

So, the ants have a built-in weeding system.

Check it out!

Special patches on their body house colonies of a specialized bacteria called Actinomyces, and these specialized bacteria produce an antibiotic that kills the fungus weeds.

See this photo of a leafcutter ant which looks like it is covered in white hair?

Well, these white hairs are the strands of antibiotic which help kill the weed fungus that kills their food fungus.

But that’s not all.

The mind-blowing part is that the leafcutter ants, their food fungus, the weed fungus, and the specialized bacteria are all only found within these leafcutter ant nests—nowhere else in the world!

Isn’t that just crazy?

These four organisms are so interdependent on each other that they cannot exist without each other and do so only in these leafcutter ant nests.

Scientists are even trying to study the antibiotics the Actinomyces produce in hopes of producing antibiotic alternatives for humans.

Aside from that, these ants are important herbivores in the ecosystems where they are from, so conservation of their habitat is super important.

Which brings me to why I don’t own a colony of these leafcutter ants and a dream setup like this.

I live in the Philippines, where leafcutter ants like these don’t exist.

And if you’ve been following this channel for a while, you might recall a previous video where we outlined the dangers of keeping ants that are not from your area.

We have always promoted the notion of responsible ant-keeping among private ant keepers and hobbyists, meaning the keeping of ants caught from one’s area.

But we do have one exception to the rule, and that is in cases like this, where the imported creatures are housed under very controlled environments for the purpose of public education and/or study.

Meet Dominic, the resident myrmecologist of the Insectarium and the one who has cared for this colony since they first received it 7 years ago.

He just so happened to be refilling one of the food stations with oats when he spotted me filming and told me he was also an AC Family member.

How neat!

Dominic said the Canadian government granted them a very special permit for them to display these animals and have them in the museum.

He also mentioned that they are under constant surveillance, having to abide by super strict terms regarding maintaining the exhibit and keeping it secure to not allow the ants to escape.

Even if these tropical ants may theoretically fail to survive a Canadian winter, there are still other ways in which escaped ants can negatively impact the environment here in Canada, including spreading disease or other pathogens to local flora and fauna.

Also, there are other variables that one might consider, including the survival of the ants in indoor environments during the winter.

However, it’s totally awesome that one can visit amazing places like the Montreal Insectarium here to get up close and personal and get a glimpse at the lives of these amazing leafcutter ants.

Which in turn will go on to inspire others to admire their beauty, perhaps inspire them to seek further research about them.

It is also one of the reasons why this channel exists.

The more people know about how awesome ants are, the more people respect them and want to conserve them and their habitat.

And that is definitely a good thing—even for our own good.

Thank you guys for contributing to this growing ant consciousness by watching this video.

I truly appreciate it!

Don’t forget, guys, to give this video a thumbs up, hit the Like button, and subscribe if you enjoyed this video.

And hey, even though I can’t have this setup at home, it doesn’t mean I can’t do something similar with ants from where I live.

What do you guys say we try to create a similar setup at home in the ant room?

Which ant colony, though, would do best in a setup like this?

Perhaps a whole new ant species like Asian Weaver Ants?

Oh boy!

This may be a very big undertaking!

I’ll also marinate on some ideas and take in some of your feedback.

AC Family, until next week, this is your ant nerd AntsCanada signing out.

It’s ant love forever!

Alright, AC Family!

Aren’t leafcutter ants pretty cool?

I’d say so!

AC Inner Colony, I have left a hidden cookie for you here if you would just like to watch some extended play footage of these ants doing their thing in this impressive exhibit.

I have also left a link in the description box to the Insectarium’s website if you would like more information on the exhibit or on what other cool things you can find in the Montreal Insectarium.

And now it’s time for the AC Question of the Week.

Last week, we asked:

Name one reason why we felt the terrarium in the video was haunted?

Congratulations to Kylo Ren, who correctly answered:

“Every time we tried to move an ant colony into the terrarium, they either died or caused a problem.”

Congratulations, Kylo Ren! You just won a free e-book handbook from our shop!

In this week’s AC Question of the Week, we ask:

How do live ant exhibits like this help ants, humans, and the environment?

Leave your answer in the comments section, and you could win a free ant t-shirt from our shop!

Hope you can subscribe to the channel, as we upload every Saturday at 8 AM EST.

Please remember to LIKE, COMMENT, SHARE, & SUBSCRIBE if you enjoyed this video to help us keep making more.

It’s ant love forever!