Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [13]
HOW TO HUNT LIKE AN ARMY ANT
A year later, in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, the dryness of southern India was long forgotten. The rain was so thick and the air so muggy in the Cyclops Mountains that I felt like I was walking in a bowl of hot soup. My kinky-haired guide, Asab, had to scream his customary question over the roar of water battering leaves: “Sudah cukup?” (“Had enough?”). In the heavy rain I could barely see the ancient Russian machine gun slung over his shoulder—protection, he had told me, from guerillas.
For two days the downpour was nonstop. I slept in wet clothes. My camera, though sealed in a plastic bag, somehow got waterlogged. I was often up to my waist in mud, making it difficult, at best, to locate ants. The few specimens I did manage to collect were washed away in the middle of the night, along with the majority of my toiletries. Fortunately, my other experiences in most of Southeast Asia were far more pleasant and productive.
I had embarked for Irian Jaya from Singapore, where I would be based for two years. In India, on my diet of rice and caramels, the weight of my six-foot frame had dropped to 138 pounds; since then I had gained back twenty pounds, largely from my time in Singapore. It was hard to resist a country so immaculate and orderly that bubble gum is illegal and so attuned to style that when the Straits Times announced that Paris fashions had shifted from red and white to black, all the girls were wearing black within the week. For anyone on a student budget, moreover, Singapore was a dream come true: roti parata, fried kway tiao, Hainanese chicken rice, Hokkien noodles, and ice kachang are just some of the foods from the hawker stalls near Orchard Road that I frequented. Of more academic consequence was the University of Singapore; I often found myself nursing Tiger beer with ruddy expat professors, feeling like a character in an Anthony Burgess novel.
I rented a tiny room in a high-rise from a Chinese family whose composition kept changing. Each evening, I would return from ant-watching to find their apartment in darkness and would tiptoe past a dozen or more people sleeping in rolled blankets on the floor. At sunrise, I would be awakened by soft Cantonese voices and an aroma of tea. We had no idea what to make of each other, they with their elegant apartment managed like an ant heap, and me, the muddiest human in Singapore, leaving a trail of ants wherever I walked.
Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the early-nineteenth-century British colonial agent who founded Singapore, was a keen naturalist. His love of nature is manifest today in a Singaporean fondness for parks and gardens. This meant that there were plenty of places to observe marauders, since they do well in deteriorated natural habitats and on human-altered terrain. Lawns and gardens and the weeds that colonize human clearings almost always contain abundant supplies of high-energy food. Plants in open spaces allocate more resources to rapid growth and dispersal and less to defenses against herbivores or competitors. That means they can support more plant feeders, and thus more of the predators that eat them, including insatiable omnivores like the marauder ants.
The Singapore Botanic Gardens, founded by Raffles in 1822 to display some of his own exquisite plants, offer plenty of marauders in a manicured setting where they are easily watched. I was introduced to the gardens as an ant haven by D.H. “Paddy” Murphy, a senior lecturer at the University of Singapore. A native of Ireland, Paddy is an autodidact, an entomological genius of a kind that normally falls through the academic cracks. Because he lacked a Ph.D., his prestige-minded colleagues didn’t know what to make of the fact that when any entomologist visited Singapore,