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By Root 546 0

a chance to survive—it helps, for example, to be built like a tank, like the Pachys. Other species climb grass stalks in a gambit to carry themselves out of reach, or barricade themselves in their nest chambers. The workers of New World Stenamma alas mold a tiny sphere of clay that they then use as a door for their nest entrance. A worker closes this portal upon detecting predators—especially army ants. This is reminiscent of a defense used by the ancient Cappadocians, who lived in what is now Turkey and carved stone discs that they would roll across the entryways to their underground dwelling places when an attack was imminent. Stenamma take it a step further, constructing false entrances to blind-ended tunnels that lead their foes astray.2

TERRORIZING TERMITES

The next night the mood at Gashaka was depressed. Caspar and I had been at the station only four days, but several of the scientists had been counting the months. The malaise that can descend on people isolated for too long in the field had worsened that day, when one researcher had a recurrence of malaria and retreated to bed. Meanwhile, everyone had been on the lookout for chimp feces for Darren, and the samples were piling up; Darren had spent the miserably hot day trying to sieve ant parts from a single turd. He had a few driver ant heads to show for it, but at this rate, his thesis would require several unappetizing years.3

Anxious to escape the conversational doldrums at the dinner table, I checked on the nearby driver ant colony. I was surprised to find meter after meter of workers carrying hundreds of ghostly bodies along their route, which I reckoned were brood being transported in a migration. Then I noticed that they were heading in the wrong direction, from the savanna toward the nest. A look through my macro lens revealed that the cargo was Macrotermes, termites known for their castlelike nests of clay.

Compared to the small incursions that Pachys make on termite galleries, this reflected a battle royal going on somewhere in the dark. Here at last was a show of the voraciousness for which army ants are celebrated. My spirit soared with the primal recognition of “nature, red in tooth and claw,” as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, described it. Was this the boom in the raiding “boom and bust” I’d been looking for?

Neither Caspar nor I had read about driver ants conducting an attack of this sort.4 These swarm raiders were thought not to invade termite mounds, on the theory that they were unable to penetrate within. Termite capture was believed to be the sole expertise of other kinds of African army ants with more subterranean habits. (The Mofu people of mountainous northern Cameroon hold these belowground termite hunters in great respect, calling them the “prince of the insects.” The villagers collect the workers in a calabash gourd and pour them out in their houses, then lay a trail of ochre on the ground; this is meant to guide the ants to the most termite-infested sites in their homes.)5

Termites, like ants, have a caste system that can include small workers and soldiers. Looking closely at the trail, I watched the ants hauling the termite workers, pale blobs about their own size. Once in a while, the corpse of a soldier termite would go by; it was also the size of a worker but had an elongated orange head and needle jaws. At rare intervals came the headless body or the rust-red, bodiless head of a second, larger kind of soldier. That night I roused myself every couple of hours for an update on the progress of the ants, checking out the action on the trail by flashlight beam. By morning, the booty of the ants included the rotund carcasses of the developing reproductives, the cockroach-shaped kings and queens (termites are in fact social roaches).6 This evidence told me that the ants had breeched the colony’s defenses and were now invading the nest proper.

Where was this rampaging taking place? Caspar followed the driver ant trail to where it disappeared underground near an eroded Macrotermes mound a couple of meters across. These termites have huge colonies