Monday, August 29, 2005

Meet the African driver ant

"The swarm approaches like a monstrous black tide, around 15 metres wide and containing about 100,000 sterile sisters, working mutually as a single hunting unit. A big scorpion scuttles out from beneath a log with an ant, several thousand times smaller, clamped voraciously onto a leg. It frantically tries to dislodge the passenger with well-coordinated stinger strikes, but the ant hangs on. The ant grapples at the floor with hooked feet hampering the scorpion's escape, and, undetectable to my human senses, releases a recruitment chemical from a pair of special glands. Within seconds, hundreds respond to the call, and the scorpion vanishes below a seething throng."