The Artist Who Collaborates with Ants

On her first trek through the rain forest, in 2000, the artist Catherine Chalmers noticed movement on the ground near her feet. It was a parade of thousands of leaf-cutter ants. “There’s these perfectly cleaned pathways that the ants make and maintain, and they carry bright-green leaves,” Chalmers told me recently. “And so you saw this ribbon, almost like a drawing. Green, flickering, because light shimmers on them. I didn’t know they existed. And it was really, really beautiful.”