But the leaves are not eaten directly, either by the ants themselves (though they do suck some of the sap) or by the larvae. Instead they are painstakingly mulched as compost for underground fungus gardens. It is the small round knobs or ‘gongylidia’ of the fungi that the ants eat and, more particularly, that they feed to the larvae. Cropping by the ants normally stops the fungi forming spore-bearing bodies (the equivalent of the mushrooms that we eat). This deprives fungus experts of the cues they normally use to identify species, and it means that the fungi themselves are dependent on the
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