Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [31]
Two tall trees behind the lodge were full of golden-mantled tamarins.
So much for slogging through canyons sloppy with mud and swarming with leeches in search of rare animals.
But back to Manú.
Anna and I had not gone a hundred yards from the camp when she turned slightly off the trail. Twenty feet or so back into the bush she stopped, began searching, and finally picked up a suitable fallen branch a yard long and half an inch thick. Studying the forest floor intently, Isaw nothing unusual.
Slowly approaching a slightly built-up area of dirt located between the flaring buttress roots of a mature cecropia, she inserted one end of the stick into a small, dark hole at the top of the gently sloping dirt pile. She then proceeded to jab the stick sharply down into the opening three, four, five times.
A black shape emerged from the hole. Then another, and another.
She threw the stick aside and retreated. Fast. Their energy sapped by the unrelenting heat and humidity, people tend to move slowly in the rain forest. To this day, I don’t believe I’ve seen anyone move as fast in such sweltering surroundings as Anna did at that moment. Halting about ten feet away from the tree, she alternated her attention between the creatures that were now boiling out of the hole and me. I had insisted that I would not do anything stupid, but she was taking no chances.
Emerging angrily from their home were some fifteen to twenty Paraponera clavata. When compared to the hordes of army ants easily encountered anywhere in the Amazon, or the driver ants of tropical Africa, that may not sound like much of an eruption. Except the representatives of this genus are the biggest ants in the world.
Known in Peru as isula ants, some specimens of Paraponera are reputed to grow as long as two inches. Their hefty, ruthlessly efficient bodies look like they have been welded together out of shards of reddish black steel. Their jaws alone are longer than many species of ant. Solitary hunters, they haul everything from other ants to grasshoppers and even frogs and salamanders back to their nest, which unlike that of many ants is not dominated by a queen. The isula ant is the Spartan of the ant world, irresistible in single combat, a Hymenopteran Praetorian guard. The mastodon ant.
In other parts of South America, the isula ant is known as the bullet ant, because if you are stung by one it supposedly feels as if you’ve been shot. Elsewhere it is often called the twenty-four-hour ant, because the excruciating pain of its sting can last for a full day and nothing can mitigate the suffering.
Moving closer, I took care while aiming my camera. Every couple of minutes, a concerned Anna would say something like, “That’s close enough,” or “Be careful,” or most tellingly, “Watch your feet.” She didn’t have to warn me. Thanks to a single encounter with the tangarana ant, I had learned my lesson eleven years earlier. The tangarana ant that had stung me so forcefully had been about the size of an isula ant compound eye.
Spreading out, the agitated ants began to search for the source of whatever had disturbed their nest. In their determination and purpose, they were fascinating to watch. On their bodies, details of ant anatomy that usually have to be studied under a magnifying glass or microscope were easily visible to the naked eye. Powerful jaws long enough to be measured with a ruler opened and snapped shut expectantly.
I know what you’re thinking. This is the part where I feel a stabbing pain in my leg or arm. This is the section where I lie in bed writhing in agony for the next twenty-four hours, decrying my rashness at getting so close to such a small but deadly carnivore, lamenting my inability to see the attack coming.
Sorry.
Glancing down and away from the camera, I noticed a single isula ant actively exploring the ground near my left boot. Another was nearby. I could have raised my foot and crushed each of them into the ground. Revenge for the tangarana ant attack of more than a decade ago. Revenge in Nature, however, has neither place nor meaning. It is purely