Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [27]
Avoiding the ants by moving ahead of the raid provides a temporary respite. The best hope for any creature is to dash to freedom to the left or right of the raid, and so carry itself out of the ants’ path; but the distribution of ants must be difficult for prey to determine down among all the litter and plants on the ground, so taking this course may be a matter of chance. If the prey fails to chose the right direction, the army will advance to its new location and strike again. And if it escapes once more, a swarm may try a third time, or more. Because of their width, swarm raids are most likely to repeatedly contact the flipping worm or leaping grasshopper. (A narrow column raid is different; its net is too narrow and weak, and most victims break free. The ants in column raids therefore reap mostly seeds and frail prey, though the raid may burgeon into a swarm if they find bigger spoils.)
Minor workers at the front of a marauder ant raid in Singapore being cut to pieces while subduing a termite soldier.
A major worker crushing the termite after the minors pinned it down.
Even escapees may not survive. I once saw a cricket rocket from its hiding place beneath a leaf. In a series of zigzag moves it ended up far from the raid, but a few ants still clung to it stubbornly. Their gnawing slowed it down, until at last its body convulsed. However, the ants that subdued it were now so far from their colony that they would die before ever finding their nest again.
Participants in a marauder raid seem to be forever in battle mode. They fight with a dogged precision that is chilling, and in large raids there certainly seem to be troops to spare. The minors show by far the highest casualties. The bounding cricket managed to chew a couple of the minors on its leg to a pulp before succumbing to the rest. On my way back to the raid, I saw minor workers puncturing a plump caterpillar, and one drowned in the jelly that oozed from it. Later on in that raid I saw a termite soldier with a burnished red head that dwarfed the minor workers surrounding her like a grizzly bear cornered by dogs. The termite’s black jaws were sharp as knives, and each minor that came near was sliced apart as cleanly as if by a guillotine, until a dozen ants stormed her hindquarters and brought her down.
Like a war correspondent inured to tragedy, I watched hundreds of minors being sundered and smashed in struggles with prey, the horror of the slaughter magnified through my camera lens. By never straying from the task to save themselves, they displayed breathtaking devotion to their duty. It made me wonder about the advantage of psychological numbness in combat even among sentient humans. As one author wrote of the Civil War, “Soldiers perhaps found it a relief to think of themselves not as men but as machines.”6
Such thoughts reflect how caught up I was in the drama of the moment, pressing the button of my camera each time a surprising event happened. I saw that the minor workers were able to stretch the legs of the termite soldier until she was spread-eagled (click). By this time, the raid front had advanced beyond the victim, who was now deep within the swarm. Here the media and major workers roamed in numbers (click). The large ants were as plucky as the minors, and they had the size and mandibular power to be worthy of the designation “soldier”; but by dint of their location, most of them joined the fray at the termite only after the prey was felled (click).
My images transferred onto a storyboard that showed that inside the raid, after the minor workers immobilized the body, the medias and majors were a strike force that moved in to inflict what carnage they could. Small media workers fit into tighter nooks and crannies than the majors can reach, perhaps yielding a kind of division of labor in destruction.
The allocation of effort between the minors, which restrain prey,