Leaf Cutting Ant Forum

Update 04-22-17

The Royal Chamber.
The ants decided to build the queen's chamber this week, now I can't even see her anymore. It's incredible how they managed to make this huge chamber inside the fungus, and the queen can even move inside it. The colony seems to be doing well, I found out that they like avocado leafs, that's good, because I have a big tree here at my home, and the leafs are huge.

Update 05-07-17

It's getting cold here in Brazil and it's affecting the fungus growth a bit, but it's still doing fine, it's not dying. I think we have a new caste of bigger ants now, but I'm not entirely sure.

Hi, been offline for some time now, travelling lots. I am currently quite close to you in Guyana! Watched your video. I would say you should definitely raise the temperature on this colony. The fungus is white which is not good news. In the wild only 1 in 10000 new colonies makes it to adulthood. This is because of too much sun, flooding, predators or, in cases where the temperature drops like here, too cold to function. The benefit of taking these ants into captivity is that we can eliminate all of the extremes that cause these losses, predators and temperatures etc. In my opinion, you are certain to fail with this colony unless you take advantage of the fact that you are n control of all of the parameters of the setup and not nature. This is a fantastic colony and I, for one, want to follow its story for a long time.

Thanks for the reply. Now when I checked them again the fungus don't seem to be doing fine. There are some black and some brown spots in the fungus, I'm currently raising their temperature.
White fungus isn't good? They always had white fungus and darker fungus where they placed the plants recently.

Update 07-09-17


After a long time I'm updating this journal. The colony isn't growing much, they aren't collecting leafs very well and the fungus still dying due to the cold, but not as much as before. It's starting to stabilize, maybe the ants are "learning" how to deal with this situation.
In this video update the queen decided to go for a walk I'm not sure why. We can also see a worker carrying a big pile of eggs around, so that's a good sign that the queen still laying and they are fine.
I can't wait until the summer so they can start growing again.

Hi again, nice to see you on here. Fungus is very white, not really being added to very much. It would be my inclination to raise the temperature a little and get everything going properly again. If it was me I wouldnt wait to see if they make it or not.

JP, any new developments with the ant colony. Would love to see another video.

I hope your sexdens colony is doing great JP. Would love to see another quality video update.