Costa Rica Musings - Living with Leafcutter Ants

FROM THE GARDEN:

Around 11am I spotted a very fine thing . . . a trail of leaf cutters decimating a weed patch for the first time ever . . . dandelions, clovers and such were literally racing back to a new leaf cutter colony 20 meters away . . . I noted: "What an unusually nice change in behavior. Come look at this!"

I also observed the trait seen in previous leaf cutter colonies that, in order to protect the bigger colony from inadvertent mass destruction, they usually only bring one type of plant material down each hole in the colony. Mangos go down that hole, the herb garden goes down another hole and so on and then if they make a mistake with some poisonous tree only a small part of the colony gets killed.

Oh happiness! This lot had discovered weeds! For newbies, it should be noted there are very few weeds in Costa Rica and even the weeds sometimes have very nice pink flowers, so it's hard to be selective.

But nonetheless, it would be every gardeners joy to find an aberrant leaf cutter strain with a penchant for weeds.

2 hours later, not REALLY believing my luck I go back and check on them. Huh! They had diversified on their way back from the weed patch and now were decimating a lovely ginger plant (the greenery not the ginger) and were making inroads on a host of NEW stuff on their way back to ground zero.

I am reassured that all optimism with regards to leaf cutters is entirely misplaced (well I suppose they were here first).