In the late ‘90s, Cameron Currie, now a professor of bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin, traversed through the Panamanian rainforest to observe the world’s most ancient agriculturalists: leaf ...

In Central America’s rain-drenched forests, leaf-cutting ants collect pieces of leaves on which they grow fungi for food. But the rain can hit hard, especially for a small ant. When leaf-cutting ants ...

When someone tells you that their camera setup was destroyed by bugs, what comes to mind? A failed firmware update, maybe? How about a corrupt memory card or a faulty sensor? While those all may seem ...

Somewhere in the middle of the Amazon rain forest in South America is a strange kind of frog (Lithodytes lineatus) that appears to be completely impervious to aggressive leaf-cutter ants, and until ...

Leaf-cutter ant nests are biogeochemical hot spots where ants live and import vegetation to grow fungus. Metabolic activity and (in wet tropical forests) soil gas flux to the nest may result in high ...

Skinny lines of ants snake through the rainforest carrying leaves and flowers above their heads--fertilizer for industrial-scale, underground fungus farms. Soon after the dinosaur extinctions 60 ...

The ancestors of leaf-cutter ants swapped a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for a bucolic existence on small-scale subsistence farms. A new study has revealed that living relatives of the earliest ...

New research shows that garbage piles produced by leaf-cutter ants emit significant amounts of nitrous oxide—a potent greenhouse gas. Chemical reactions within the organic waste piles produced by leaf ...

Skinny lines of ants snake through the rainforest carrying leaves and flowers above their heads—fertilizer for industrial-scale, underground fungus farms. Soon after the dinosaur extinctions 60 ...