Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [39]
It’s unclear how individuals are chosen to take on the indolent life of a replete, leaving others to toil outside, but their lifestyles couldn’t be more dissimilar. Repairing trails and mangling prey, “orthodox” medias and majors strut high on their legs. In the darkness of the nest, their replete sisters crawl with their bodies pressed to the ground or bury themselves among the brood, interlinked with the outstretched legs of resting minor workers.
Determining the population of a marauder nest—typically between 80,000 and 250,000 workers—can be an adventure. For an excavation in Thailand, for example, I traveled north of Bangkok to Tam Dao National Park in the company of primatologist Warren Brockelman, who was studying the brachiating ape known as the gibbon. At a station inside the park we heard stories of a local tiger that had grown so brazen that he would leap through open windows and drag out the bodies of his victims. Sleeping that first night in Warren’s open lean-to, I was awakened in the dark by the sound of rumbling breath. At sunrise Warren pointed to tiger prints in the dirt.
Later that morning I joined Warren to watch a pair of pileated gibbons sing a duet in a little valley. Noticing a marauder trunk trail nearby, almost invisible in the heavy leaf litter, I fell to my knees and for over an hour inched along the trail, grateful to forget all those vertebrates, whose simple behaviors, like leaping through windows, made the marauder ant’s superorganized throngs seem all the more awe inspiring, small or not. Oblivious to the time, I continued until I found myself near the crest of a hill. At the crest was the columnar trunk of a dipterocarp tree, and at the base of the tree, marked by the discarded soil and ant trash spilled around its buttressed roots, was the nest, at last! For several heedless seconds, I scrambled around the tree on my hands and knees, in the classic “compromising position.” Then something caused me to look up, and there, just two yards away from me, was a bull elephant. Wrinkled and gray, he stood absolutely still and silent, with his right forefoot lifted as if he’d been about to step forward. For that moment only his eyes moved, the eyelashes rising and falling in a blink. When he turned and crashed into the forest, all I could think of was how unfathomably larger than an elephant I must appear from an ant’s perspective.
After recovering from the unnerving but thrilling encounter, I exhumed the ant nest with a foldable camp shovel, put several kilograms of ants and soil in a plastic bag, and stumbled back to Warren’s jeep, a half-hour away. That evening at the park hostel’s dining room, I convinced the cook to let me put my bag of treasure in the kitchen freezer. I needed to freeze the ants—thus incapacitating or killing them—in order to separate them from the soil so I could make my counts. I went to bed satisfied by a good day’s work.
But the next day a different cook was on duty. No one had told him about my ants, and he’d removed the bag from the freezer and placed it on the floor. The ants had revived, cut their way through the plastic, and stormed the kitchen. I managed to round them up after an hour, enduring countless bites to my fingers. Grateful that my knowledge of Thai curses was meager, I also managed to mollify the new cook with two Singha beers and many compliments on his stir-fried