Anthill: a novel by Edward O. Wilson

Author:Edward O. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Teenage boys, Nature conservation, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), General, Fiction - General, Ants, General & Literary Fiction, Alabama, Fiction, Naturalists
ISBN: 9780393071191
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-09-15T07:00:00+00:00

22

EARLY THE NEXT DAY, as the rising sun warmed and dried the dew from the grassy ground of Dead Owl Cove and the Nokobee anthills all around it came to life, the Streamsider army resumed its attack. Once again Trailheader soldiers formed a defensive ring around the entrance to their nest. This time no Trailheader minors joined the sally. The buffer previously provided by these smaller workers outside the soldiers' ring was gone. The Streamsider assault was focused, massive, and unrelenting. Within an hour the force had built to maximum field strength. The Trailheader soldiers, weakening, fell one by one. No new fighters crowded in to replace those lost, and the ring broke. Streamsider soldiers and minor workers, with the elite scout in the front rank, rushed past the last of the remaining defenders and poured down the central tunnel.

As they penetrated deep and fanned out into the peripheral galleries and chambers, the Streamsider conquerors met almost no resistance. The growing strength of alarm pheromone and their own alien colony smell, filling the nest interior, drew them forth. In contrast, the Trailhead Colony exploded into pandemonium. Each defending worker was now concerned only with her own survival. The entire surviving worker force was a panicked, helpless mob. It fled upward and out into the open to break through the enemy workers massed there. Many were snared as they rushed past Streamsiders running in the opposite direction. No further communication was attempted. There would be no chance to return as an organized group. Without a queen or nest, the Trailhead Colony no longer existed. All its land, including the underground nest, was now Streamsider territory.

Most of the individual Trailheader refugees found temporary shelters on the surface, hiding beneath fallen leaves and cracks in the soil. A few met by chance and stayed together for a while. One by one, nevertheless, they were picked off by predators and enemy ants. They tried to dodge and run to hide again, but there were no odor trails and visual markers to guide them anywhere, and no nest to serve as a destination. The social organization that had defined their antness had now been stripped away. They lived individually only hours or, at most, a few days longer. One was snatched by a wolf spider, and another fell into a rain puddle. Yet another came too close to a running column of army ants, which seized it and cut it into pieces for food.

As the invaders explored the abandoned nest interior, they gathered a few newly hatched adult workers too weak to run out of the nest with their older nestmates. All these captives the Streamsider raiders carried back unharmed to their own nest, a few to be eaten but most to be kept as slaves. Their captors took advantage of a trait basic to all kinds of ants: the individual slaves learned and thereafter accepted the odor of the colony in which they lived during the first several days following their emergence from pupa into active adult life.

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