Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [66]
With this, Caspar and I were shown to the office of the director of security to pay the park entry fee of one dollar. There I learned one way to identify an official’s position in the Nigerian hierarchy. While the director had summoned his secretary with an intercom, and the assistant director had fumbled with an old hand-cranked bell, the lowly director of security had to scream over a shoulder—even though in each case the woman had been sitting close enough simply to talk to.
Bureaucracy loves a vacuum. It takes root and flourishes in places where the cogs and mechanisms of governance are rickety or dormant. I have been confounded by procedural excesses in offices and shops and checkpoints throughout the world, but sometimes the curlicue of red tape takes my breath away. Perhaps that’s why, as Aldous Huxley wrote, “However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization.”1 I left those offices thinking about the value we humans place in authorities and chains of command, despite their being so open to abuses of power and greed and so prone to failures of communication. Leaderless ant societies, by comparison, seem to be a universal success story, capable of mobilizing themselves as needed for any job.
By the time we were turned loose it was late afternoon, with a few low clouds rushing overhead. We hitched a ride from the headquarters into the park and, with no time to spare, hiked into the thickety forest. Immediately we found army ants pouring across the road. A little further on we encountered another species. Then another. Walking briskly, we discovered four species of army ants by sunset. Our most thrilling find was a Dorylus mayri driver ant raid, which resembled a swarm of Dorylus rubellus but scaled up a notch. There were millions of ants, and they ran blazingly fast, in a front that spread a full 20 meters wide and traveled high into the trees. Caspar assured me this species compared favorably in size and speed with Dorylus wilverthi of the Congo, which Albert Raignier and Jozef van Boven studied in the 1950s. Their Belgian jaws must have dropped when they documented the largest army ant colony yet recorded: twenty-two million workers, by their calculations. To sustain this army, they estimated, the queen had to lay three to four million eggs each month—about a quarter billion eggs in her lifetime.2 (Months later, on an expedition to Ghana with the army ant ecologist Bill Gotwald, I would come upon another of Africa’s most awe-inspiring driver ant species, Dorylus nigricans, raiding with a swarm front 32 meters across. Crying out from what felt like hundreds of tiny vises embedded in my legs, I ran through a stream of flowing bodies visible for as far as I could see, an experience almost up to the standard of the 1954 film The Naked Jungle, in which Christopher Leiningen, played by Charlton Heston, finds himself “up against a monster 20 miles long and 2 miles wide. . . . 40 square miles of agonizing death!”)
Caspar and I turned our attention to a batch of army ants pouring over a spot 3 meters in diameter. Their columns streamed under every object and reticulated through rotten logs. This “Dorylus species in the congolensis-kohli complex,” as Caspar described it, was intermediate, meaning it carries out its activities just out of view within the leaf litter. Other driver ant species, such as rubellus, mayri, wilverthi, and nigricans, are surface active, raiding on the exposed ground and occasionally in trees, whereas the subterranean army ants live and die mostly hidden from view.
The portioning off of foraging activities by layer may help avoid strife between colonies. While army ants seem willing to assault almost anything in their path, they rarely fight one another; instead, their raids shift out of the way with little