News Animals

Mineral body armor helps some leaf-cutting ants win fights with bigger kin

A species of leaf-cutting ant has a tough layer of calcite on its exoskeleton, experiments show

Worker ant with calcite mineral armor

A thin layer of calcite on worker Acromyrmex echinatior ants (white covering in this microscope image) doubles the hardness of the insects’ exoskeleton, a new study finds.

H. Li et al/Nature Communications 2020

By Christie Wilcox

- More than 2 years ago

Leaf-cutting worker ants might look like they’d be helpless against an enemy soldier ant many times their size.