Leafcutter dance

A somewhat ethereal slow shot of a long leafcutter trail at La Selva biological station in Costa Rica.If you look up at the top of the clip when it pans out, you can see the trail disappear off into the distance. These trails are amazing, they stretch for hundreds of yards and are packed full of ants 24 hours a day. If you look very closely, you can see a few leaves that have the tiny "hitchhiker" ants on them. These are a special small caste of leafcutter ants that helps protect the workers from being parasitized by phorid flies. The flies will lay an egg inside the worker - when the egg hatches the larve of the fly crawls up into the ant's brain, eats its brain and then the ant's head pops off and a new phorid fly flies out. Pretty amazing stuff. It is a lot like the Aliens movies.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• leaf
• cutter
• leafcutter
• art
• pretty
• serene
• trail
• walking
• leaves
• ants
• costa
• rica
• la
• selva
• biological
• station
• ots
• atta

[isjackal]

recorded with a leaf ?

too bad...