leaf-cutting ants

"Leafcutter ants are masters at building and running their city. With a population to rival NYC, they employ builders, farmers, nannies, cleaners, and even pharmacists! Brave foragers venture into the trees to bring back slices of leaf to keep the fungus crops growing, while those at home expand the city's tunnel network and tend to the young--and the queen, the city's founder"--Provided by publisher.

"The Leafcutter Ants provides a tour of Earth's most evolved animal societies. Each colony of leafcutters contains as many as five million workers, all the daughters of a single queen that can live over a decade. A gigantic nest can stretch thirty feet across, rise five feet or more above the ground, and consist of hundreds of chambers that reach twenty-five feet below the ground surface. Indeed, the leafcutters have parlayed their instinctive civilization into a virtual domination of forest, grassland, and croplandfrom Louisiana to Patagonia. Inspired by a section of the authors' acclaimed The Superorganism, this illustrated work provides the explanation of what a social order with a half-billion years of animal evolution has achieved."--BOOK JACKET.

Simple text and photographs present the features and behavior of an unusual species of ants.