There are more than 14,000 species of ants known to science, though experts estimate there may be as many as 22,000 currently crawling through the undergrowth.
At least 55 of these species belong to a group known as the leafcutter ants, which comprises three main genera: Atta, Acromyrmex, and Amoimyrmex.
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Contrary to popular belief, these ants don’t eat leaves. Instead, they harvest, transport, and process leaves, turning them into food that sustains the domesticated fungus they farm inside their nests. To support these fungus farms, leafcutters construct colossal, city-like nests where millions of individuals, divided into several different castes, work at the behest of a ruling queen.
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According to Guinness World Records, the largest leafcutter ant nest ever recorded covered in excess of 67m², which is roughly the size of a small apartment!
This nest contained 1,920 chambers, 238 of which were occupied by fungus gardens. However, this measurement only took into account one complete internal structure casted with cement, excluding potential satellite chambers or extended foraging-linked structures.
While nests are occupied they’re difficult to measure accurately. This is why documented nest sizes are few and far between; to measure the size of a nest, researchers find abandoned nests (or coax ants out of active nests) and pour concrete into them, creating internal casts that can then be measured.
Other studies have reported central mounds of leafcutter ant nests growing to more than 30m across, with smaller radiating mounds spreading out to a radius of 80m. They can extend to significant depths too, as deep as 9m in some cases.
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Together, these mounds can occupy a space that’s roughly the size of two tennis courts (or 600m²) - though it’s worth noting these kinds of sizes are estimates and haven’t yet been formally recorded.
It’s not just the size of these nests that are impressive, it’s their structure too. Inside, there are thousands of rooms, each organised according to its specific function.
The only structures more elaborate are those constructed by humans, such as the record-breaking First World Hotel in Pahang, Malaysia, which (as of 2015) was made up of 7,351 operational rooms.
A significant proportion of the rooms in a leafcutter ant nest are used for growing fungus, but others contain nurseries, dedicated rubbish areas, and storage facilities for dormant workers and excess leaf material. These rooms are connected by a series of tunnels and ventilation shafts that are crucial for regulating temperature, humidity, and airflow within the nest.
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In every nest there’s also a spacious chamber for the queen, where she’ll lay hundreds of eggs per day. The worker caste tends to the queen in her chambers, taking her eggs and transporting them to nurseries where they later hatch into larvae. Interestingly, the larvae are raised in separate nurseries depending on their developmental stage - forming a kind of ‘schooling system’ not too dissimilar to our own.
To ensure there’s as little cross contamination inside these nests as possible, leafcutters tend to position their rubbish areas well away from their fungus gardens. A 2017 study found that in nests belonging to the species Atta capiguara, waste chambers were distantly separated (roughly 4-6m away) from fungus gardens and concentrated in a ‘dead zone’ underneath large, loose mounds of soil close to the surface.
These waste chambers were conical in shape and quite large, approximately 3m high and 0.5m wide. That’s roughly the volume of a small car boot’s worth of storage in a single chamber!
The fungus chambers, in contrast, were spherical in shape, buried deeper in the soil, and not quite as large. Still, the largest of these chambers had a volume of roughly 22L - large enough that it could pass for a carry-on bag on a budget airline.
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