I experienced there, which forced the ants to be cryptic and subterranean. I would continue my marauder ant studies in Southeast Asia, where the species was common.
Rajaram Dengodi, smiling dreamily as he strummed his guitar, saw me off on the bus to Bangalore. As I climbed the steps, the proprietor of the booth where I had been buying caramels ran over and gave my hand an enthusiastic shake. He had gone upscale, with fresh paint and a fancy poster of the Indian deity Ganesha. I wondered how much of my patronage had gone into subsidizing his new, neatly lettered, laminated sign: FRIENDLY MEGA SUPRMRKET STORE.
HOW TO HUNT LIKE AN ARMY ANT
A year later, in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, the dryness of southern India was long forgotten. The rain was so thick and the air so muggy in the Cyclops Mountains that I felt like I was walking in a bowl of hot soup. My kinky-haired guide, Asab, had to scream his customary question over the roar of water battering leaves: “Sudah cukup?” (“Had enough?”). In the heavy rain I could barely see the ancient Russian machine gun slung over his shoulder—protection, he had told me, from guerillas.
For two days the downpour was nonstop. I slept in wet clothes. My camera, though sealed in a plastic bag, somehow got waterlogged. I was often up to my waist in mud, making it difficult, at best, to locate ants. The few specimens I did manage to collect were washed away in the middle of the night, along with the majority of my toiletries. Fortunately, my other experiences in most of Southeast Asia were far more pleasant and productive.
I had embarked for Irian Jaya from Singapore, where I would be based for two years. In India, on my diet of rice and caramels, the weight of my six-foot frame had dropped to 138 pounds; since then I had gained back twenty pounds, largely from my time in Singapore. It was hard to resist a country so immaculate and orderly that bubble gum is illegal and so attuned to style that when the Straits Times announced that Paris fashions had shifted from red and white to black, all the girls were wearing black within the week. For anyone on a student budget, moreover, Singapore was a dream come true: roti parata, fried kway tiao, Hainanese chicken rice, Hokkien noodles, and ice kachang are just some of the foods from the hawker stalls near Orchard Road that I frequented. Of more academic consequence was the University of Singapore; I often found myself nursing Tiger beer with ruddy expat professors, feeling like a character in an Anthony Burgess novel.
I rented a tiny room in a high-rise from a Chinese family whose composition kept changing. Each evening, I would return from ant-watching to find their apartment in darkness and would tiptoe past a dozen or more people sleeping in rolled blankets on the floor. At sunrise, I would be awakened by soft Cantonese voices and an aroma of tea. We had no idea what to make of each other, they with their elegant apartment managed like an ant heap, and me, the muddiest human in Singapore, leaving a trail of ants wherever I walked.
Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the early-nineteenth-century British colonial agent who founded Singapore, was a keen naturalist. His love of nature is manifest today in a Singaporean fondness for parks and gardens. This meant that there were plenty of places to observe marauders, since they do well in deteriorated natural habitats and on human-altered terrain. Lawns and gardens and the weeds that colonize human clearings almost always contain abundant supplies of high-energy food. Plants in open spaces allocate more resources to rapid growth and dispersal and less to defenses against herbivores or competitors. That means they can support more plant feeders, and thus more of the predators that eat them, including insatiable omnivores like the marauder ants.
The Singapore Botanic Gardens, founded by Raffles in 1822 to display some of his own exquisite plants, offer plenty of marauders in a manicured setting where they are easily watched. I was introduced to the gardens as an ant haven by D.H. “Paddy” Murphy, a senior lecturer at the University of Singapore. A native of Ireland, Paddy is an autodidact, an entomological genius of a kind that normally falls through the academic cracks. Because he lacked a Ph.D., his prestige-minded colleagues didn’t know what to make of the fact that when any entomologist visited Singapore, he or she called on Paddy. No matter what the researcher’s area of expertise—whether some obscure group of crickets, plant lice, or marauding ants—Paddy would pull out the specimens in his collection and begin gently instructing about the local species. The visitor would leave enlightened, while Paddy seemed to soak up everything his interlocutor knew.
In addition to showing me the Botanic Gardens, Paddy took me in his battered white Nissan on expeditions to Singapore’s watershed, the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. After several hours rooting in the mud and stuffing specimens into vials, we would finish our day with a stop for a drink. Oblivious to our jungle-rat appearance, he’d drive to one of Orchard Road’s fancy hotels and, shuffling into its gleaming five-story foyer, demand two Tiger beers from the bar, all the while holding his insect net like a national flag. Libation consumed, we would then retreat to his flat, where his wife, a chemistry professor of Indian descent, kept a motley herd of little dogs. Sitting at the kitchen table, Paddy would scrutinize the day’s catch, never raising his eyes from the magnifying glass. Meanwhile the dogs, announced by a rumble of paws on the tile floor, ran in formation like a migration of African wildebeests, circuiting the house every minute or two.
After another round of beers from his fridge, Paddy would drop me off at what came to be my favorite part of the Botanic Gardens, a seldom-visited back section where I began to understand how deep were the convergences between marauder and army ants. The foraging behavior of both displays a specific set of characteristics that, in scientific fashion, form a sequence in my head. In brief, (1) the workers are tightly constrained by one another’s activities, such that while individuals constantly enter and leave the raid on a trail to the nest, (2) those in the raid nevertheless avoid spreading apart, so that the raid retains its existence as a cohesive whole; in fact, (3) adjacent ants stay close enough together that communication between them can be virtually instantaneous. (4) This unit moves along a path that (5) is not controlled by any steadfast leader or leaders within it, (6) nor by scouts arriving from outside. Indeed, (7) their movement does not target a specific source of food, (8) nor is progress dependent on finding food en route, because the ants are drawn forward not just to meals but also to the land ahead; further, (9) the advance can continue across “virgin ground,” because advance doesn’t require cues left by prior raids. Finally, (10) all foraging is collective. No ant sneaks out to grab lunch on her own.
These features basically define what we mean by the words group and forage in these mass-foraging ants. The first three describe a particular sort of group in which proximity turns out to be essential: no marauder ant searches alone for any significant distance.16 That means food never has to be abandoned while help is enlisted. Overpowered quickly, prey is unlikely to be stolen, or escape, or have occasion to defend itself. The other attributes describe a certain kind of foraging in which the searching group has no predetermined destination and need not take any particular course.
All these details took me months to work out in that back section of the gardens. I was largely hidden there from the heavy tourist traffic, though I do recall one passing wedding party that was shocked and then fascinated to see me on my hands and knees, counting ants performing the superman task of carrying a lizard egg. The bridesmaids lifted the bride’s veil as she too stooped to take a look.
2 the perfect swarm
At the end of my first week in Singapore I had my first clear view of a swarm. It was late afternoon in a remote corner of the Botanic Gardens. Paddy Murphy sat nearby, smoking a “fag” and examining a silverfish on a tree. I had spent the previous hour on my hands and knees following a trail of marauder ants that were obviously on a foraging expedition, because they were bringing back all kinds of prey. And there, suddenly, near the base of a Brazil nut tree, was a throng of ants—shimmering with the movements of thousands in the cropped grass. I’d caught glimpses of such mobs in my Indian plantation’s understory brush, but here was one open to scrutiny, a band of ants 2 meters wide and over 7 centimeters from front to back.
