Leafcutter ants of the American tropics exemplify animals that exhibit superorganism status, advanced social organization and symbiosis. As you walk through the jungle you become aware of these ...

Overloaded leafcutter ants develop “blind spots” that slow their movement - showing how nature’s most efficient workers hit sensory limits.

If you’ve ever visited the rainforest exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, or walked in a real rainforest in Central or South America, you might have wondered what the ants ...

You have one of two relationships with leaf-cutter ants. First, you’re a nature-lover, visiting Costa Rica, as you always do, when it’s a little too cold at home. You’re enjoying the house you don’t ...

A complex genetic analysis has biologists re-evaluating some long-held beliefs about the way societies evolved following the invention of agriculture -- by six-legged farmers. A complex genetic ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I cover the living world, from microbes to ecosystems. Long before humans discovered agriculture 10,000 years ago, leafcutter ants ...

The American Museum of Natural History is unveiling an enormous new exhibit of leafcutter ants. Making it happen was no picnic. A leafcutter ant carrying a flower petal inside a new exhibit in the ...

Scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama discovered that carrying oversized loads limits ...

What do leafcutter ants and scores of middle-school students have in common? A mouth full of metal-laced teeth. Tiny arthropods such as ants, spiders and scorpions routinely bite, sting or otherwise ...

If you think leafcutter ants are harmless little fellas with a knack for making their own salads, let wildlife expert Coyote Peterson convince you otherwise. Warning: if you’re the least bit squeamish ...

The fact that cows produce a ton of greenhouse gas in the form of methane is science factoid that people tend to pull out in casual climate discussions (you have those, don't you?). As it turns out, ...

Leafcutter ants live in highly organized colonies where every ant has a job, and now researchers can flip those jobs like a switch. By manipulating just two neuropeptides, scientists can turn ...