The Costa Rica Leaf Ant Research Report by MHS Students

Our Program on August 16th was a report on one of our sponsored projects, the Costa Rican Leaf Ant Study. Present at our meeting were four of the sixteen Minnetonka High School biology students who participated, a biology teacher, and John Doleman, who originally brought the project to our attention. Through our sales of coffee, we funded three of the students who participated.

Molly Swenson introduced the four students present at our meeting, and they made a presentation on the experience. The trip was from July 29 to August 8. They were outside a small town in Costa Rica where a Ph.D. in Biology is conducting experiments to find out more about leaf ants. These ants cut up leaves on trees and transport them to the nest where they are processed by the worker ants by chewing them up. The result of the process is a powerful anti-biotic drug, more potent than anything our scientists can come up with.

The students broke up into 4 groups, and each group conducted an experiment to develop more information on some aspect of leaf ant life. The ants live in gigantic anthills, and they devour many crops planted by the local farmers. Two of the experiments involved ways of controlling the ants to keep them from  wiping whole fields of crops out and bankrupting the farmers.

The four students were very articulate and felt that they had learned a lot about the scientific process, and all plan to continue in the scientific fields. (Story by Tad shaw and posting and photo by Steve Frazier)