This was just a peculiar, funny moment my friend Alan and I had while we were hiking a few weeks ago. We were walking along, talking about animals that we were seeing at Radnor Lake and all of a sudden my mind goes off thinking about something else and I say, "You know what's weird?" And if you know me, what I think is weird at that moment could be ANYTHING. Then when Alan replied he actually guessed what I was thinking about!!!!!!!! He said, "leaf cutter ants." I didn't know the name of these ants, but I knew those were what the ants I was thinking about were called because that's why I thought they were weird because they cut leaves. I of course freaked out and couldn't believe he randomly guessed that because I think these ants are only in Brazil or South America.
I'll actually tell you about these weird little ants. They are so cool! Sparky and I went to the Botanical Garden in Rio de Janeiro. When we were walking along we noticed a looong line of ants, I wanted to stop and look at them so we sat down and watched them. It was amazing. They were in a single file line and each ant was carrying a tiny triangle of a leaf. The line of ants was climbing up this tree and dropping it off and then the line would go back down and go the other direction. We watched them do this for a while and then we looked back and noticed they were coming from a long way down the path. So we walk along the trail of ants and saw that they were going up another tree. This tree is where they were getting the snippets of leaves and then sending it back to the other tree one by one. Here's a wikipedia site on them if you want to check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leafcutter_ant
and a national geographic kids video on them: http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/kids/animals-pets-kids/bugs-kids/leafcutter-ant-kids.html
The picture above is the one I took when we were watching them!
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