ants, morphos, and devices

I wrote the following a month or so ago but I feel like sharing it now because there are even more ants now than before! They are arriving en mass and invading our house! I jokingly asked Arlenie if it is now “ant season”, she thought I was serious and replied that “no, there is no season of the ant in Belize”. But seriously, they are everywhere in the kitchen now and I really don’t think our kitchen habits have suddenly or significantly changed in the last few weeks.

"Over 100 species of ants and termites are found within a square mile of average South American tropical forest. When all the animals in a randomly selected patch of woodland are collected together and weighed, from tapirs and parrots down to the smallest insects and roundworms, one third of the weight is found to consist of ants and termites. Between them they form the conduit for a large part of the energy flowing through the forest." Taken from E. O. Wilson’s book, Biophilia.

This weekend, I travelled to an ecoresort/soon to be private reserve, with Elma and her biodiversity class. Our charge was to work in teams to inventory the plants, insects, amphibians and reptiles, birds, and fungi. The goal of which was to both give students experience using identification keys and provide them with a hands on learning environment in which to explore taxa. The secondary goal was to provide the owner with an idea of the species present on his land.

Upon arriving, I began scouting out an ideal spot to hang my tent hammock. After some searching, I found the perfect 2 trees- each with the appropriate diameter and distance between them. As I stood there admiring the trees, I became acutely aware that I was being bitten. Not by the standard mosquito or a single sand fly but by about 30 ants, all at once. I was standing on an anthill. Fuck. There was no obvious water source nearby so off came the chaco’s, I commenced to madly swat at my feet, curse, and carry on with other swift movements associated with pain. While, I should add, about 5 students stood watching the spectacle. Fabulous.

There are ants everywhere here. The super fast tiny brown ones that always seem to invade the sugar and honey and partake in any, however minute, crumbs left on the kitchen table. Members of the same species often investigate my power mints (double strength altoid in the form of a hard candy) only to become trapped in the slightly sticky outer layer. Frozen in time like those insects encapsulated in sap which has become amber over the years. Then there is the giant variety that Steve and I saw on a palm trunk in Tikal. 1 inch long, black, with huge mandibles and white abdomens.

But by far my favourite species and probably the most charming (I haven’t been bitten by one yet) in the ant world, to a biologist that is, is the leaf cutter ant. Leaf cutters cut small irregular shapes of out leaves, carry them in the usual line back to their nest where the leaves are deposited. A fungus living in the nest feeds on the leaves and the ants in turn feed on the fungus. Symbiotic relationships are always fascinating to me.

Surprise ant nests abound. As Steve and I (mostly Steve) were working on the UB compost pile, I went to pick up a pile of misc. vegetative scraps that had accumulated outside of the shade house. It seems that an ant colony had found it quite the suitable habitat and took up residence there, which I recognized immediately by the stinging bites I received on my hands as I transferred the brush to the wheelbarrow. Bites on the hands are the worst, in my opinion. We left the pile for the ants.

A few weeks ago, I accompanied a group of students out to Calabash Caye to participate in a trash clean up. We ended up also doing a bit of landscaping by removing stumps of dead palms. The stump I chose had already partially decomposed and thus the outer layers peeled away easily. As I was carrying these palm remnants to the burn pile, I again became aware of the series of bites that can only be ants. These were larger though and black. Ouch!

Then there’s the commonplace cockroach carcass being consumed by a hungry hoard of ants and the usually ant lines to step across as one traverses trails cut into the bush.

In the butterfly breeding house we toured this past weekend at the ecoresort, ants had attacked, killed, and were devouring the blue morpho caterpillars in captivity. It takes almost 3 months for a spectacular morpho butterfly to develop from egg to adult and then the adult only lives for 3-4 weeks. They have a 5-6 inch wingspan on average. Morpho is a genus and so there are roughly 80 described species. The iridescent blue color of the morpho has become nearly a symbol of the neotropics, difficult to catch and a site that inspires.

''In all of the Neotropics there are few sights more spectacular than watching the flight of a male morpho lazily sail above the canopy of the rain forest or along a river on a brilliantly sunny day,'' wrote Philip J. DeVries in ''The Butterflies of Costa Rica and Their Natural History.''

















I digress, this is about ants. When one begins to anthropomorphize ants or any social insects such as bees, termites, or wasps, for that matter, all sorts of admirable analogous characteristics come to my mind such as cooperative living, effective and efficient means of communication, clear delineation of individual duties which contributes to the welfare of the larger community, and so forth.

But then the flip side is the (I just swatted one of the small ones crawling on my forearm) potential problems associated with obedience sans question or logic, conformity, and the lack of creativity, free will, or reflection. I think that I’ve heard some authors refer to this as “hive mentality”. I can’t seem to locate any of the passages or even recall the specific author(s) but I seem to remember an analogy between the ant line and conformity and so forth. I guess what I’m getting at…is that I don’t want to be an ant.

To address the photo below…background: people leave food out here more often than at home. If someone cooks up a dish at lunch time that they’ll also eat for dinner, they just leave it covered in a pan on the stove rather than putting it in Tupperware and the fridge. Below, you see Arlenie’s contraption designed to maintain her French toast ant free, that is a moat of water in the bowl. So far so good, it works, no ants. Yes, they make French toast here with evaporated milk and egg as the batter. I also heard someone say “oh-kee-doe-kee” the other day.