Undermining; Leaf Cutting Ant damage to roads

[Acromyrmexbob]

A common sight in the tropics is when a colony of leaf cutters, having founded their colony by a road, continue to expand until they are excavating soil from under the road itself. This combined with the weight of vehicles passing over the road above normally leads to the collapse of the road. I have seen this several times during my travels around Central adn South America



This one is only at the stage of spilling over onto the road, but if left uncontrolled then the road will deteriorate. This picture is from Brazil.

Taken from http://brunalab.org/blog/2013/01/18/ernane-vieira-neto/

[Atta solider]

Will you be going to get that colony Andrew?

[Acromyrmexbob]

Are you kidding!! That colony will have well over 100 rugby ball sized fungus gardens, tens of thousands of majors and will be very difficult to locate the queen. No I stay well clear of these. Interesting point though. If you go to an area year after year and keep taking colonies away, you are ruining your own source of colonies. So we always leave the bigger colonies alone so they are there to produce the queens that form the new colonies for us to get!