Yes, ants eat mushrooms, and some species have built their entire survival strategy around fungi. The relationship between ants and mushrooms ranges from casual scavenging to one of the most sophisticated farming systems in the animal kingdom. Leafcutter ants have been growing their own fungal crops for roughly 60 million years, while other species forage wild mushrooms from the forest floor.
Leafcutter Ants: The Original Farmers
The most dramatic example of ants eating mushrooms comes from the attine ants, a group of about 19 genera found primarily in Central and South America. These ants don’t actually eat the leaves they cut. Instead, they carry leaf fragments back to underground chambers and use them as fertilizer to grow a specific fungus called Leucoagaricus gongylophorus. The fungus breaks down the tough plant material into nutrients the ants can digest, and the ants tend the fungal gardens with remarkable precision, weeding out competing molds and adjusting moisture levels.
What makes this system especially interesting is that the fungus has co-evolved with the ants to produce specialized feeding structures. The fungal cultivar grows inflated hyphal tips called gongylidia, which cluster into small bundles. These structures exist for one purpose: feeding the colony. Worker ants and larvae eat gongylidia almost exclusively, getting their carbohydrates, proteins, and energy-dense fats from these tiny fungal packages. Glucose derived from the broken-down plant material is the primary food source for leafcutter ants of the genus Atta, supplemented by proteins and amino acids the fungus produces.
The nutritional profile of gongylidia is rich in lipids, particularly those containing linoleic acid, a fatty acid also important in human nutrition. Researchers have identified 263 distinct lipid species across 18 subclasses in gongylidia alone. The fungus essentially converts indigestible plant cellulose into a nutrient-dense food tailored to the ants’ needs.
How Colonies Pass Down Their Crops
Leafcutter colonies don’t start their gardens from scratch each generation. When a young queen leaves on her mating flight, she carries a small piece of the mother colony’s fungal garden in a specialized pouch in her mouth called an infrabuccal pocket. After mating and finding a suitable nesting site, she regurgitates this fungal starter culture and begins cultivating it, using her own fecal droplets and early leaf material to get the garden going. This vertical transmission means some fungal lineages have been passed from queen to queen for millions of years.
This isn’t limited to leafcutter ants. Azteca ants, which live inside the hollow stems of Cecropia trees in the Neotropics, carry fungal spores and hyphal fragments when founding new colonies. After a queen finds an unoccupied young tree, she digs into a stem internode and begins cultivating her fungal crop from the material she brought along.
Ants That Hunt Wild Mushrooms
Not all fungus-eating ants farm their food. Euprenolepis procera, a species found in Southeast Asian rainforests, is one of the few known ant species that relies almost entirely on foraging wild-growing mushrooms. This is an unusual strategy because mushrooms are unpredictable. They pop up quickly after rain, decay fast, and don’t appear in the same spot reliably.
To cope with this challenge, E. procera colonies build complex networks of stable foraging trails through the forest floor. When scouts locate a fresh mushroom, workers quickly mobilize along these pre-established routes to harvest it before it rots. The trails themselves stay in place even when no mushrooms are available nearby, giving the colony a permanent infrastructure for rapid response. It’s a foraging system specifically adapted to exploiting food that appears and disappears within days.
What Ants Get From Fungi Nutritionally
Fungi offer ants something most plant material cannot: accessible calories. Raw leaves are loaded with cellulose and lignin that ants lack the enzymes to break down on their own. Fungi, whether cultivated or wild, have already done much of that digestive work. The farmed fungus of leafcutter ants produces enzymes that degrade leaf polysaccharides into simple sugars, primarily glucose, which becomes the colony’s main energy source.
For ants eating wild mushrooms, the nutritional appeal is similar. Mushroom fruiting bodies are relatively high in protein and contain readily available sugars and fats compared to most plant tissue. For a colony of thousands or millions of individuals, a reliable source of pre-processed nutrients is a significant survival advantage.
Beyond Eating: Ants and Fungal Ecology
The relationship between ants and fungi extends beyond simple consumption. Some ant species that nest in plants cultivate fungi not for food but to support the growth of epiphytic plants in their gardens. These “ant gardens,” mutualistic associations between ants and plants growing on other plants, harbor endophytic fungi that promote plant health. The specific ant species involved actually shapes which fungal communities develop. Colonies of the ponerine ant Neoponera mertensii, for example, support different fungal communities than those built by Camponotus femoratus, and these fungal differences affect how well the garden plants grow.
Other ant species interact with fungi in less structured ways. Pseudomyrmex ants in Africa and the Neotropics feed their larvae pellets containing fungal spores and hyphae gathered from the mycelium lining their host trees. Whether this counts as “eating mushrooms” depends on your definition, but it shows how deeply fungi are woven into ant nutrition across many lineages, not just the famous leafcutters.
The short answer is that ants and mushrooms have one of the most varied and long-running relationships in the insect world. Some ants farm fungi with a sophistication that rivals human agriculture. Others hunt wild mushrooms with coordinated trail networks. And still others incorporate fungal material into their diets in quieter, less conspicuous ways. Across all these strategies, fungi provide ants with nutrients they couldn’t easily get from any other food source.