SAN JOSE – They are born into royalty, from a queen fed and cared for by hundreds of loyal subjects in Costa Rica. The queen then flies away in search of suitable princes that will allow her continue her lineage. After this nuptial flight, the queen will lay up to 200 eggs for years to come, and she will instruct her subjects to extend her vast underground realm, complete with fungus farms that provide nourishment, medications and even renewable energy sources to the subterranean complex.

The paragraph above appears in the illustrated tale of Queen Zompopa, part of an online initiative to increase the interest of students and researchers on the leaf-cutter ants of Costa Rica. The story can be found on zompopas.com, a new web portal designed to providing the public and scientific community with information about these amazing insects. This new site will interest young students, biologists, tour operators, farmers, and the general public. This project was born from a proposal by Dr. Adrian Pinto Tomas, winner of the 2010 Clodomiro Picado National Science Award, and it will be available starting on Thursday, June 21^st.

Zompopas.com is the culmination of a project by the University of Costa Rica that started two years ago, and which was funded in part by the Florida Ice & Farm Company, a prominent manufacturer of beverages in Costa Rica. The project has not exclusively unfolded online; at the Guayabo National Monument in Turrialba, leaf-cutter ants threaten architectural structures and the nearby forests, and thus park administrators set out to develop an organic method to control the voracious ants. Thanks to research efforts detailed in zompopas.com, the ants will now be relocated to a special section in the forest where ecotourists can enjoy learning about Atta cephalotes.

The formal launch of the zompopas.com web portal will take place at the University of Costa Rica investigative campus on Thursday, June 21^st at 9:00 am. For more information, please contact Caterina Elizondo at the Ministry of Science and Technology (MICIT in Spanish):

• Telephone: 2248-1515, ext. 121
• Email: [email protected]