Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [50]
Munching on the insect, I detected a hint of nuttiness and a trace of the pungent sourness of formic acid. Driver ants are not as oily as the plump marauder food-storage repletes. Nor are they as tangy as weaver ants, which have a mentholated lime flavor and are served in India as a condiment with curry dishes. Certainly they aren’t as desirable as honeypot ants, which Australian aborigines and southwestern American Indians find delectable.
Though they do not offer the candied delights of honeypots, driver ants are toothsome enough to chimpanzees to be one of their dietary mainstays, and that’s what had brought me to Nigeria. Caspar Schöning, who at that time was studying driver ants at Copenhagen University, had invited me to join him while he organized a research project on ant consumption with University College of London primatologist Volker Sommer. Joining us would be Darren Ellis, a student of Volker’s.
Just as different human cultures have developed different techniques and tools to kill prey, from spears to snares, the chimps across Africa have evolved distinctive traditions and methods to hunt ants.3 (Until recently, this kind of cultural diversity was thought to be unique to humans.) The chimps at Gashaka-Gumti National Park, where Caspar and I were going, use branches as harvesting tools, stripping off their leaves and inserting them into driver ant nests or, possibly, poking them at ant trails; the technique is known as ant dipping. Putting the stick in their mouths like a lollipop, they peel away the furious ants, which cling to each other in strings. Eating ants sounds painful, but driver ants don’t sting, and as I discovered, they don’t bite your tongue if you chew fast. The chimps’ use of sticks may have more to do with reaching deep into the nest in order to stir up as many ants as possible than with avoiding bites. In other places, chimps bravely reach into driver ant nests with their hands, which enables them to grab the delicious larvae and pupae.
But when driver ants are on the offensive, they’re fearsome hunters. Caspar, a perceptive, gentle German with the physique of a welterweight fighter and blond hair cut military-style, was an enthusiast of the ant’s prowess. The driver ant expert at Utica College, Bill Gotwald, had been told by a village chief in Ghana about a human baby that had been killed by the ants.4 I had heard that driver ants can even bring down a cow. Many African tribes believe that before a python feeds, it checks its surroundings for driver ants—which would flay the snake alive with their knife-blade mandibles if they found it too distended by a meal to escape.
As Caspar and I set out from Abuja for Gashaka-Gumti, on the border with Cameroon, we found ourselves in the midst of a desert storm. So much dust was being carried on Harmattan winds from the Sahara that our view on the two-day ride to the park was abysmal. The sun shone no more brightly than a full moon.
Jammed into a crowded jeep for the final step of our many-hour journey, we crossed a wide river just before reaching the field station inside the park. The water rushed up past the tires, but the driver plowed forward, knocking against rocks as the water continued to rise. A fellow passenger pointed to the spot where a student had gone for a swim the year before and been caught by a crocodile. His lifeless body was found under a rock, where the crocodile had stashed him for a later meal. Balanced precariously in the flatbed in the back, clinging to six other people, stacks of luggage, and tied bundles of squawking chickens, I concentrated on the happy fact that the air was clearer at this slightly higher elevation.
Once at the field station, a few low concrete buildings, Caspar and I dropped our baggage and headed up a footpath to start surveying the local ants.