Warrior Ants and White Ants
I
IT occasionally happens, in the hot parts of Africa, that one’s attention is attracted by the following occurrence. One may be sitting, say, in front of one’s tent, or on the verandah of one’s house, when one suddenly notices a quantity of the ordinary, harmless brown ants, which are to be met with everywhere, approaching in disorderly, headlong flight, many of them clutching their pupæ to their thoraces, like babies, just as the women of German villages, in the Thirty Years’ War, might, have clutched their babies to their breasts when they fled from their homes at the sounding of the dreaded cry of alarm: The Swedes are coming!
One would imagine that a superior human being, unless he happened to be an entomologist, would bestow but momentary attention on the distressed insects, and, after a passing glance, return to his occupation. Not so, however, the experienced old African. He will rise, in greater or lesser haste, according to his temperament, call his servants, and say to them: ‘Siafu are approaching; look about everywhere, and stop them if you can.'
The servants need not be told twice, however easy they may take life as a rule: they will start running, and search the surroundings of the tent or house in extending circles, until one of them will sing out: ‘There they are!’ and as likely as not these words will be accompanied on the spot by jumps into the air, kicks, and clappings of the palm of the hands on the naked feet and calves — a behavior which, to the uninitiated, would appear unaccountable as well as ridiculous. He has met the avant-garde of the enemy’s column!
Siafu is the Swahili name for the smaller of the two common kinds of warrior ants. The larger of the two, conspicuous by its odious smell during the rainy season, although a sharp biter, is a quantité négligeable compared with its smaller cousin, whose ferocity, determination, and pluck are unimaginable. Their bite is very painful — that of the soldiers, with their disproportionately large heads and mandibles, particularly so; and so bloodthirsty are they, that, rather than let go, they will suffer their bodies to be severed from their heads. The bite, however, is fortunately non-poisonous, and leaves no ill after-effects when the assailant has been torn off; but this does not prevent the Siafu from being a very real danger to living beings. Caged birds and mammals are killed, if not rescued in time. I remember a case in which they killed, during the night, a caged wildcat! I have known them to kill pigs in their sties, by crawling into their brains through the snout. It has happened that babies, who had been temporarily deposited on the ground by their mothers and left alone, have become their victims. The little brother of a servant of mine, in the Tahita mountains of British East Africa, was killed in this way.
This sort of death, as is generally known, was a capital punishment for certain crimes, in use with many native races.
Although the European ant, as regards ferocity, cannot be compared with the African warrior ant, it, too, was used occasionally, and not so long ago either, as an instrument of torture. During the Polish insurrection in 186364, the insurgents killed prisoners by hanging them from trees, head downward, into ant heaps; and the same horrible torture was, until not many years ago, a favorite way of retaliation used in Slavonic countries by poachers against obnoxious gamekeepers.
The rapidity with which Siafu spread over the body of animate beings, whether man or beast, is amazing. Old residents in Zanzibar will remember the sensation that was created when the wife of a foreign consul, walking with her husband on the Muari minoja, — the ‘Rotten Row’ of the African Ceylon, — having inadvertently stepped into a procession of warrior ants, was so rapidly infested by the enemy that, wild with pain and disgust, she tore off her outer dressing until she stood there, coram publico, in night attire. It was, fortunately for the poor lady, not the fashionable walking hour.
People are apt to lose their heads completely under these circumstances, the moral effect being at least as strong as the physical one. A friend of mine, who lived near Lake Victoria, once told me how a guest of his, who was sleeping in the same room, near the window, was attacked by Siafu in the middle of the night, and already covered with them when he awoke. He jumped out of bed, tore off his pyjamas, and started dancing about, yelling for his boys to come and pick off the insects. But when they arrived running, he, instead of standing still, began boxing their ears, whereupon they, believing that their master had gone mad, ran out of the house again, terrorized, leaving him to shift for himself. My friend, heartless fellow, told me that he nearly died with laughter, as everybody else would have done in his place, I suppose.
It was in Zanzibar that the writer’s own first acquaintance with Siafu was made. He was walking in the country with a friend, an old resident, when the latter suddenly called out: ‘Ants! Ants! ’
‘Do they bite?’ the writer naïvely asked.
‘You will soon know!’ was the reply. And, indeed, a few minutes later, he had gained experience for a lifetime.
H. G. Wells has foreshadowed a sinister possibility— the evolution of the African ant to tiger-size! One imagines the path across the continent of an army of a million tigers, so fierce that, rather than release the cow they have seized, they will allow their heads to be cut off!
Siafu are worst just before the rainy season, when, in dry, hot weather, they go in search of water, and during the rainy season, when their underground dwellings become flooded. They do not walk during a heavy downpour; but their appearance is generally the presage of rain.
There are several ways of preventing Siafu from entering a house in the daytime, when timely notice of their approach has been gained. That most commonly used, and of slowest effect, is the strewing of ashes in their path and the beating on the head of the column with firebrands. So great is the Siafu’s pluck and determination, that the rear keeps moving on and on, while the head is being destroyed — advancing over the bodies of the slain; and it is not until the ranks of the column are entirely disorganized, that the separate individuals will alter their course.
But, fortunately for mankind, if those invincible warriors fear not death, they have their idiosyncrasies in point of smell, like Henry of Navarre, who fainted at sight of a rose. One of these aversions is known to all native tribes from the Juba to the Limpopo; they cannot stand the smell of a smouldering rag, but it must be the rag of a garment which has been long worn by man. This remedy is fairly effective: the rags are twisted into a kind of rope, and pieces of it are deposited, with due regard to the prevailing wind, either in such places as the column, on its way to the dwelling-place, is likely to pass, or all round the latter. They are then lighted. Sometimes, when these rags have been deposited round about the house, or tent, a native, running with a stick which he presses firmly down, connects the different pieces by a line marked on the ground. The object of this does not seem quite clear, but some natives consider it to be an essential part of the defense.
It is amusing to recollect, in this connection, that the late Maurus Jókai, the great Hungarian novelist, states in one of his books, that a sure means to make a herd of cattle stampede is to smoke, to windward of it, a pipe into which the ‘sediment’ of an old hat has previously been scraped!
The natives of the Livingstone Range use the bulb of a plant which they call kirago: they chew it, and then spit in front and on the head of the advancing enemy. This remedy is very effective. The natives who use kirago also say that warrior ants will not pass where kirago has been planted; but I have never had occasion to test the truth of this assertion.
All these measures make it comparatively easy to avoid being rushed by an army of Siafu during the day; but the question assumes a much more serious aspect when the fiend, having avoided detection during the daytime, succeeds in penetrating into the habitation, or the stables, at night, either by entering through such apertures as offer or by burrowing. Natives, when their huts have been thus invaded at night, simply bolt, and spend the night elsewhere. But Europeans, unless they happen to live in houses with several rooms, have, as a rule, nowhere else to go, and have therefore no other choice but to help their servants fight the invader, or else go for a nightly walk of several hours’ duration — an alternative which, in the rainy season and on moonless nights, is anything but a pleasure.
To get rid of Siafu in a house, whether of mud and wattle or of brick, is a complicated affair, unless you happen to live in a country where kirago grows, and where the natives are familiar with its use. In a house with a thatched roof one has to be exceedingly careful when handling firebrands or ashes; besides, in the nature of things, unless they happen to strike an open door or window, these predatory pests penetrate into a house only in driblets; and, in proportion as you destroy those that appear, others take their place. I have emptied a 300 centigramme bottle of sulphuric acid, practically without effect, on the head of an army of Siafu, which was entering through interstices in a mud wall.
It is sometimes a good plan, in a tent, to remove from the path of the ants all things that might attract them and stop their march: they then may simply march through. When they come up, as also happens, through the chinks between the bricks of a badly cemented brick floor, the difficulty increases, as the only way to reach them is through those very chinks — a narrow channel; they then keep making unexpected visits at all hours of the day and night. In a case like that, Cooper’s or MacDougal’s Sheep Dip and Jeyes’s fluid, are the only remedies, provided they are used unsparingly. The same applies to those occasions when the ants have dug up from underneath, in stables.
It also happens, occasionally, that either part, or the whole, of the invading army climbs the wall of a house and settles in the thatched roof for a time, the duration of which depends on the amount of prey that they find there. Nothing can be done in such a case but to wait patiently until they leave, and destroy, in the meantime, the small detachments which climb down the walls inside. I remember one time, when this happened to me. I had a cat, with three kittens, living on the roof, to reach which she had to climb a tree and then jump across. She carried her children down, one after the other and saved them all; but I had to pick out Siafu afterward from the skins of the lot, including the brave mother.
All the remedies above mentioned, however, are only makeshifts without permanent effect, as the ants will always return, from time to time, to a place once visited. There is only one radical way to avoid this, and that is to find out, by following their path, where their nest is and destroy it. This establishment lies, as a rule, a few feet below ground, among the roots of trees. It is necessary first, to uncover as far as possible this dreadful sink of iniquity, — one dark, seething mass of the most bloodthirsty creatures in creation, — which looks like a single huge, glossy, twitching and shivering monster coiled up. Then, where this is practicable, quantities of boiling water are poured upon it; where it is impracticable, owing to the distance from house and water, heaps of dry wood are piled into the openings and then set fire to. A great many are killed, and as many, perhaps, escape; but the nest is invariably deserted within a few days; and, if it was the only one in the neighborhood, one may be safe from similar visitations for years to come.
II
White ants, as everybody knows, are not really ants, chiefly because, owing to the beautiful long wings of their females and males, they have been classed in the order of Neuroptera, to which ants do not belong. Nevertheless, they are very hymenopteric in their habits and in the constitution of their monarchies, and their appellation, ‘ants,’ is certainly not a case of lucus a non lucendo.
As objectionable pests and sources of annoyance, they run their warrior cousins very close, although bloodthirstiness does not form part of their character. They stand, in relation to the warrior ants, as a gang of thieves working in the silence and darkness of the night would stand in relation to a band of highway robbers and murderers. All the same, their workers, when your skin happens to come into contact with them, inflict severe pain; but it appears to be a secretion rather than a bite, as they do not get hold with their mandibles; also, the pain is instantaneous, like the burning of a very virulent nettle, and spreads over the whole area of the contact. All animals carefully avoid treading among whiteant workers. Unlike the females and males, which, when they have shed their silky mantle of wings, are merely ugly brown beetles, these workers, of two sizes, are extremely pretty insects, with amber heads and thoraces of pearl; imitated in these materials, they would make beautiful breastpins and hatpins.
These workers have a peculiar habit: although they avoid, as a rule, the light, and prefer moving and working in darkness, one frequently meets them, during the rainy season, in the forests, trekking along in single file. Sometimes two lines are marching parallel to one another, in opposite directions, at a distance of one to two inches; whenever two ants meet abreast, they stop, bow head and thorax deep to the ground, and then continue, each on his way.
But, however courteous the termites may be in their intercourse with their own kith and kin, the fact remains, that, in their relations to mankind, they are incomparable destroyers of property; they are even an element distinctly inimical to culture, as wellto-do planters in the Tropics, who could afford to adorn the walls of their countryseats with pictures of value are deterred from doing so by the certainty that termites respect an original painting no more than a chromo, and that a single night is sufficient for the destruction of both.
When invading a house, termites always move underground and then dip up in the night like a Jack-in-the-box. Sometimes, they emerge underneath a mat, which is soon hopelessly spoiled; sometimes underneath a box; and, unless one looks under the boxes every day, the contents, say, books, may be hopelessly destroyed below, while the top still looks intact. It is true that they give a warning signal, but it is of so weak a kind that, unless one lives in a tent, or in a very small room, or unless they happen to make their final preparations just underneath one’s bed, it must always be missed. This signal is a sound which closely resembles the noise that a basket of small seed would make if it were emptied on a hard polished floor: it is the dangersignal; if you hear it in one night, you know that, in the course of the next night, the white ants will appear — never in the night during which the noise is first heard. This latter detail, confirmed by the writer’s experience, is well known to natives; they say that the white ants, in the night of their arrival, first want to make sure if everything is all right, and that it is only when they are satisfied on this point that they emerge in the night that follows. To move along the walls and gain the rafters, they make ingenious covered ways. In these, however, personally, I have never met any but the smaller kind of workers, never the large ones, who would appear to move inside the walls, as they, too, undoubtedly reach the roofs of houses.
White ants yield easier than warrior ants: sheep dips, Jeyes’s fluid, paraffin poured into the holes through which they come up, always chase them away pro tem., and their visits grow less and less frequent, unless by misfortune the house has been built just above their city. In the latter case, there is no help, and they will soon gain the roof, and slowly destroy the wooden parts. I have known of solid brick buildings, with corrugated iron roofs and cement floors, which had finally to be abandoned and pulled down because they had inadvertently been erected over a nest of termites.
Tolstoy has written, in The Invaders, this beautiful sentence: ‘All evil feelings in the heart of men ought, it would seem, to vanish away in this intercourse with nature —with this immediate expression of beauty and goodness.’
One may be allowed to doubt whether the great philosopher, if destiny had taken him to tropical Africa, would not have caused to be erased from future editions of his book the last two words of the sonorous phrase. For nothing in the world conveys more forcibly to one’s understanding Mother Nature’s ruthless extravagance, and absolute disregard of the individual, than the annual nuptial flight of the termites.
A scourge to African mankind as termites are, it is impossible, for anyone but a native, to ignore the pathos — the word is used deliberately— of these hymeneal festivities. As most people know, every year, at the beginning of the rainy season, the males and the females of the white ants emerge winged from their underground dwellings, generally during the afternoon, and fly out into the mild light of the evening for a short flirtation and honeymoon, which does not last much longer than the day itself, followed by a return to the earth, the shedding of the wings, hastened by roundabout movements of the insects themselves, and, in due course, by the organization of new monarchies under the sway of the now pregnant queens, who soon develop into monstrous receptacles of eggs. One supposes that t he occasion must be one of rejoicing for the two sexes, which crawl out of their tunnel, trailing their long silky wings behind them, accompanied and surrounded by a highly excited crowd of amber-headed workers. Others, however, rejoice in an equal degree, and these are the legions which prey on them!
There does not appear to be a single creature indigenous to Africa, from the Negro downward, which does not appreciate the winged termite as a delicacy. Natives catch them in cunningly devised traps, devour them alive, devour them dead, raw or fried or roasted, or dried in the sun, or pounded to a paste. They pack them in bags like beans, alive or dead, and sell them on the market. It is a surprising fact, not only that termites which have been tightly packed in a canvas bag for a whole night are still alive in the morning, but that those among them which have not shed their wings are still able to fly; it shows what a wonderfully elastic texture those wings are made of.
Besides natives, monkeys, apes, dogs, cats, mongooses, and lizards, all kinds of ants feed on termites voraciously, although they leave the workers religiously alone. Even the large black warrior ant, which carries away the males and females without difficulty, when it inadvertently finds itself face to face with a worker, immediately turns tail — a behavior which gives support to the opinion that the latter’s defense lies in a secretion rather than in its mandibles.
And the birds! It is amazing how the news spreads among them, that a flight of termites is taking place at such and such a locality, often completely hidden by trees!
Yet they all get the news, and birds turn up, of the existence of which in the district one had no idea — rare and strange species, like those equivocal human apparitions which emerge, nobody knows whence, in large cities, at times of stirring events. On these occasions, the birds — which would appear to form a sort of truce among themselves; for I have frequently noticed birds of prey in the assembly — sit down on the trees surrounding the termites’ heap, and, whenever one or more insects rise on the wing, a sharp competition for the capture ensues. It all looks just like a game, in which the participants are so keen, that they even lay aside, to some extent, the fear of man — of the white man.
I have never seen any written computation of the probable proportion between slain and survivors; but the percentage of the latter must be infinitesimal. Naturalists call this ‘the keeping up of the balance of life.'