Can I take a minute to tell you all about how incredible leaf cutter ants are?

These little guys, or shall I say little gals — all of the worker ants are women — travel in perfect array hundreds of yards from their colonies in the Amazon jungle to find this particular species of tree. They cut the leaves of this tree into little puzzle pieces which they stack on their backs and lug all the way back to the mound. Once there, they mix their leaf with this microorganism that I think is in their spit and actually grow mushrooms, which they then eat.

Meanwhile, the Queen ant is busy pumping out two thousand of these female worker ants every day with semen she has stored in her body from the last flight of the virgin queens and princes.

And what is this flight, you may ask? At some certain point in the colony’s life cycle, the queen stops producing regular worker ants and starts producing potential queen ants and a few male “prince ants.” When all of this is done (I want to say by the light of a full moon), the hundreds of thousands of potential queens and princes fly out of the colonies in an event I can only imagine looks like a geyser spewing black creepy-crawlies into the sky, to find a mate. The male and female ants bind, and all of the male’s semen gets transferred to the queen. His job is done, and he dies. Then the queens fall back to the forest floor to start whole new colonies. Only some small percentage of them actually survive.

Apparently, indigenous communities eat these ants like a delicacy. On the night that all of the ants are to fly they set fires around the exits to the colonies, so when they come spewing out, their wings are burnt off. They are then collected and roasted. Fascinating. That’s all I really had to say.