• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 501 0

of his herd, keeping them from harm and even moving them to fresh pastures when the plant sap runs dry—preferably to a site with young foliage, which is more easily penetrated by their mosquito-like mouthparts. Often, the ants construct a “pavilion” nest, a kind of holding pen, over the insects, as they do also with nectaries, before settling in to exploit them over the long haul.42 Such leaf enclosures protect the Homoptera from predators, parasites, and weather and may even be essential to the ants’ claim on their herd, since workers are less active outside their nests at night, when other species could steal from resources not under heavy guard.

In short, their continuous social dialogue enables weaver ant workers to exploit resources no matter how they are distributed. Throughout their absolute territories, the workers scatter widely to hunt prey on foliage or cluster densely to feed at nectaries or the sites of their homopteran herds. Colonies grow big and strong with a balanced meat and vegetable diet, so they are most vigorous where all of these sources of food are bountiful, such as in the young and succulent vegetation along forest edges.43

Among ants such as the weaver, the flow of food and other goods is likely to be regulated by what’s available and what’s needed, a supply-and-demand market strategy.44 This is best observed in the workers of the red imported fire ant, which monitor the nutritional needs of the other adult ants and of the larvae and change their actions as necessary.45 When scouts and their recruits converge on the nest laden with a variety of foods, they hawk their merchandise by regurgitating samples into the mouths of “buyers” in the nest chambers, who in turn roam through the nest to distribute the meals to the larvae and queen. If the buyers find their “customers” have become sated on meat, they peruse the marketplace for other commodities, until they find, perhaps, a seller offering nectar. When the market becomes glutted and the sellers can no longer peddle their wares, both buyers and sellers wander off to engage in other jobs, or take a nap. This is an excellent way to run a superorganism: if only our digestive systems served us this well, rejecting any excess fats arriving in our meals!46

The diet choices of weaver ants affect their anatomy. Compared to the meat-sustained driver ants, the largely vegetarian adult Oecophylla are thin-skinned, with no special armaments. This may be because nectar and honeydew derived from plants are poor in the nitrogen needed to build proteins. In the economics of weaver ant existence, the carbohydrates in these readily available liquids are the fuel that the adults burn on their labor-intensive hunts for prey, while the prey themselves provide the bulk of the protein the larvae need to complete development and keep the superorganism growing. Even with their feeble armor, few adult weaver ants are killed in encounters with these prey; they are so fleet-footed that even army ants succumb to them.

Both the weaver ants and the army ants are predatory titans, but the two approach their lives differently. The army ants’ narrowly concentrated raids comb wide areas to gain enough of the protein they require, especially from large and aggressive prey.47 But weaver ants remain settled in one area and minimize travel within it by harvesting a steady and more varied local supply of plant foods and honeydew in addition to small and large prey. These differing tactics have allowed both ants to flourish with colony populations reaching into the hundreds of thousands.

10 fortified forests

Oecophylla weaver ants swarm through the tropical rainforests of Africa, Asia, and Australia, but because life in the trees has so many advantages, the New World has its own hyperaggressive canopy-dwelling ants.

One morning in late spring 1990, I found myself slung by ropes a dozen meters above the jungle floor rummaging for beetles in clumps of litter on tree branches. I was in Peru, on assignment for National Geographic magazine, to document the rainforest canopy, one