A species of leaf-cutting ant has a tough layer of calcite on its exoskeleton, experiments show
Leaf-cutting worker ants might look like they’d be helpless against an enemy soldier ant many times their size. But some of the smaller ants have a secret: Their entire body is coated with a thin but tough layer of mineral armor.“I found rock ants,” evolutionary biologist Hongjie Li recalls telling his colleague, evolutionary biologist Cameron Currie, when the first experimental results of the hard coating came in. “I can still feel the excitement now,” Li says.
The discovery was serendipitous, says Currie, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who has been studying leaf-cutting ants for more than 20 years.
