A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
leafcutter
Leafcutter can mean two unrelated insects that both cut pieces out of leaves and take them home. Leafcutter ants strip vegetation in long columns and carry the fragments underground, where they chew them into a substrate and grow a fungus on it that the colony eats; they do not eat the leaves themselves. Leafcutter bees cut neat circles and ovals from leaves and petals and use them to line individual cells in a nest tunnel.
Etymology
Both names are plain description, arrived at separately, and the coincidence is worth noting because the two insects are doing entirely different jobs with the same action. Latin gets more specific: The ant genus name means, roughly, thorn ant, and the bee genus name is Greek for a cutter of stone, which the namer applied to the way the bees line and seal a nest.
Notes
Leafcutter ant colonies are agricultural. They cultivate one fungus, weed out competing molds, apply bacteria they carry on their bodies as an antibiotic against a specific parasite, and maintain the crop with a division of labor across several sizes of worker. The largest colonies run to millions of individuals and move more soil than any other animal in the tropics.