Many species farm large areas surrounding their colonies and leave walking trails that compress the soil, which can no longer grow plants.

Attine gut microbiota is often not diverse due to their primarily monotonous diets, leaving them at a higher risk than other beings for certain illnesses.

They are especially at risk of death if their colony's fungus garden is affected by disease, as it is most often the only food source used for developing larvae.

[2] This New World ant clade is thought to have originated about 60 million years ago in the South American rainforest.

[5][6][7] Higher attines, such as Acromyrmex and Atta, are believed to have evolved in Central and North America about 20 million years ago (Mya), starting with Trachymyrmex cornetzi.

This evolution of using gongylidia appears to have developed in the dry habitats of South America, away from the rainforests where fungus-farming evolved.

[3] About 10 million years later, leaf-cutting ants likely arose as active herbivores and began industrial-scaled farming.

[20][23][24][25][26] The mature worker ants wear these cultures on their chest plates and sometimes on their surrounding thoraces and legs as a biofilm.

Instead, she gains energy from eating 90% of the eggs she lays, in addition to catabolizing her wing muscles and fat reserves.

[2] For now, a reproductive caste, made of male drones and female queens, and a worker class, that vary greatly in size, are known.

[2] Since their needs are constantly taken care of, queens rarely move from a single location, which is typically in a centralized fungal garden.

[2] In the higher attines, though, head width varies eight-fold and dry weight 200-fold between different castes of workers.

When a foraging area is threatened by conspecific or interspecific ant competitor, the majority of respondents are smaller workers from other castes, since they are more numerous, and therefore better suited for territorial combat.

Most likely, they are older workers that defend carriers from parasitic phorid flies that attempt to lay eggs on the backs of the foragers.

[33] The majority of fungi that are farmed by attine ants come from the family Agaricaceae, mostly from the genera Leucoagaricus and Leucocoprinus,[2][34] though variance occurs within the tribe.

[37] It was previously assumed that the cultures are always transmitted vertically from colony to young queen, but some lower attines have been found to be growing recently domesticated Lepiotaceae.

[2][39] Lower attines do not use leaves for the majority of the substrate for their gardens, and instead prefer dead vegetation, seeds, fruits, insect feces, and corpses.

[42] The number of ants that are recruited to cut varies greatly based on the leaf quality available in addition to the species and location of the colony.

[2] After following the pheromone trail to vegetation, ants climb onto leaves or grass and begin cutting off sections.

[54] This is likely because many factors affect how ants cut leaves, including neck flexibility, body axis location, and leg length.

[55][56][57] Often, ants stridulate while cutting vegetation by raising and lowering their gasters in a way that makes a cuticular file on the first gastric tergite and a scraper on the postpetiole rub together.

[58] This makes a noise, audible by people with great hearing sitting very close to them and visible using laser-Doppler vibrometry.

Smaller ants then crush these fragments and mold them into damp pellets by adding fecal droplets and kneading them.

[2] Smaller workers then pluck loose strands of fungus from dense patches and plant them on the surface of the freshly made pile.

The smallest workers, the minim, move around and keep up the garden by delicately prodding the piles with their antennae, licking the surfaces, and plucking out the spores and hyphae of unwanted mold species.

Xylan, starch, maltose, sucrose, laminarin, and glycoside apparently play the important roles in ant nutrition.

[2] In a laboratory experiment, only 5% of workers' energy needs were met by fungal staphylae, and the ants also feed on tree sap as they collect greens.

[73] Larvae seem to grow on all or nearly all fungi, whereas queens obtain their energy from the eggs nonqueen females lay and workers feed to them.

[33] The cutting of leaves to grow fungus to feed millions of ants per colony has a large ecological impact in the subtropical areas in which they reside.