Leaf Cutting Ant Forum

This worker has been in the fungus a few days now. Has a completely white body. You can see him in the middle of the screen:
http://youtu.be/NwfeJ7nGGEQ
What is this? Why is she white?

I'm not 100% certain but I believe the white is there natural antibiotic that covers certain ants bodies. Sure someone else can correct me if I'm wrong and elaborate, good spot!

Thats my understanding also. It helps kill undesirable organisms living on the fungus garden. As the colony matures so there will be more visible. Most of the ants in the nest will have a scattering of this on them at some stage. Nice topic for a post

Cool. Then fungus is getting big so I guess there will be more of these soon

Hello all sorry not been on much my heads been all over place as its soon be Christmas not looking forwod to it but I've got question does the atta go into this as well as I've not seen any with white on them

Don't think this is visible on Atta. Not sure if there is any data regarding this but I would think this is not the case with Atta. Maybe Adam can help with this.

Oh okay thanks Andrew

Acromyrmexbob wrote:Don't think this is visible on Atta. Not sure if there is any data regarding this but I would think this is not the case with Atta. Maybe Adam can help with this.

I have yet to experience this with Atta too.

This is taken from some research that is going on at University of East Anglia, Jackie who has just joined here works there.

The page this is from is https://www.uea.ac.uk/leafcutter-ants/a ... utter-ants

Leafcutter ants create a warm, humid environment to grow their fungus and this is attractive to many other parasitic and disease-causing microbes. To protect their food source the worker ants constantly patrol their fungus gardens and remove unwanted bacteria and fungi. Many attine ants, including Acromyrmex, also grow symbiotic filamentous actinobacteria on the outside of their bodies and use the antibiotics made by these actinobacteria to kill the unwanted microbes. When an attine colony produces new queens they take a piece of the fungus and some of the actinobacteria called Pseudonocardia with them to start their new colonies. This is called vertical transmission because the fungal and bacterial symbionts pass directly from generation to generation.

Attine ants have most likely been using natural product antibiotics for as long as they have been farming fungi, i.e. more than 50 million years. Compare this with humans which evolved no more than 400,000 years ago, developed agriculture 10,000 years ago and discovered the first natural product antibiotic less than 100 years ago and the achievements and civilizations of the attine ants is truly staggering.

- See more at: https://www.uea.ac.uk/leafcutter-ants/a ... dLMUg.dpuf

Check out this film about the bacteria that lives on Acromyrmex

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxnmh4IDYaU