6o JUNGLE ISLAND 



Other plants or different kinds of mushrooms start 

 to grow in the warm, rich leaf mold, it is the 

 job of the tiny Atta to kill them at once. 



Leaves too wet or too dry would spoil the 

 mushroom bed. This is probably the reason why 

 Attas do not bring in leaves when it rains nor in 

 the dry noontimes. 



When a queen ant leaves the home nest to 

 start a colony of her own, she carries with her, 

 tucked away in her cheek, a small pill of the food 

 plant which she tends as carefully in her new nest 

 as she tends her eggs. She will even chew up the 

 eggs to fertiHze the plant's roots. As soon as 

 the first young ants are large enough they take 

 charge of the garden and begin carrying in leaves 

 to make the garden beds. 



All her life the queen ant continues to lay eggs. 

 They hatch out into tiny, white wormlike grubs. 

 These are usually placed near the top of the 

 nursery, and there the smallest workers take care 

 of them when they are not tending garden. They 

 sort the grubs according to size and feed them 

 differently. Watching very closely through a 

 magnifying glass, you may see that when the 

 tiniest grubs are hungry they pout out their lips. 

 Then the first nurse passing by stops and feeds 

 the hungry baby by brushing a bit of the mush- 

 room food across its lips. Nurses are always 

 passing about with food held in their jaws so 

 that a grub does not have to wait very long. 



