sole worker. She grows the garden, fertilizing it with her fecal liquid, but does not eat from it. Instead, she gains energy from eating 90% of the eggs she lays, in addition to catabolizing her wing muscles and fat reserves. Though the first larvae feed on the eggs of the queen, the first workers begin growing and eating from the garden. Workers feed malformed eggs to the hungry larvae while the garden is still fragile. After about a week of this underground growth, workers open the closed entrance and begin foraging, staying close to the nest. The fungus begins growing at a much faster rate [] an hour. From this point on, the only work the queen does is egg-laying. Colonies grow slowly for the first two years of existence, but then accelerate for the next three years. After around five years, growth levels out and the colony begins to produce winged males and queens. The founding of a nest by these queens is highly difficult, and successful cases are not likely. After three months, newly founded colonies of Atta capiguara and Atta sexdens are 0.09% and 2.53% likely to still exist, respectively. Some species have better odds, such as Atta cephalotes, which are 10% likely to survive a few months. Caste system Attines have seven castes performing roughly 20–30 tasks, meaning the potential exists for development of more specialized castes performing individual tasks for Atta's future. For now, a reproductive caste, made of male drones and female queens, and a worker class, that vary greatly in size, are known. Queens have much larger ovaries than females in the working castes. Since their needs are constantly taken care of, queens rarely move from a single location, which is typically in a centralized fungal garden. Workers take their eggs and move them to other fungal gardens. Differences in size between worker castes begin to develop after a colony is well established. Workers Description Lower attines have very minor polymorphism within the minor workers, though higher attines commonly have very different sizes of worker ants. In the higher attines, though, head width varies eight-fold and dry weight 200-fold between different castes of workers. The size differences in workers is nearly nonexistent in newly founded colonies. Due to the variety of tasks needed to be performed by a colony, the widths of workers heads are important and good measures of what jobs workers