Caption: Pictured in October 2009, a leaf-cutter ant queen tends to a fungus garden in her colony, surrounded by her brood. These ants grow a fungus, which serves as the primary food source for the entire colony, using leaves the ants harvest from the rainforest. Recent research in the lab of Cameron Currie, associate professor of bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has revealed two symbiotic bacteria in the fungus garden that fix nitrogen for these ants. Nitrogen is a limiting nutrient in Neotropical ecosystems.
Photo by: Michael Poulsen
Date: October 2009
300 DPI JPEG