Sweet in Tooth and Claw by Kristin Ohlson

Sweet in Tooth and Claw by Kristin Ohlson

Author:Kristin Ohlson [Ohlson, Kristin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI003000, SCI086000, SCI070060, SCI020000, SCI008000, NAT010000, NAT000000, ARC010000, NAT037000
ISBN: 9781925713169
Publisher: Scribe
Published: 2022-08-02T05:00:00+00:00


Chapter 6

I’ll Take My Coffee with Birds

Ivette Perfecto raps her knuckles on the enormous sope tree shading the nearby coffee plants, as vigorously as if she is knocking on someone’s front door and expecting them on the doorstep pronto. The tree’s inhabitants quickly muster the predicted response: dozens of small brown Azteca ants rage out, ready to inflict damage on the intruder. Perfecto steps back and peers closely to see if the next act in this ongoing ecological drama will unfold. Sure enough, a tiny fly begins to buzz the ants, drawn by the alarm pheromones they emit when disturbed.

‘There is the phorid fly!’ she cries out gleefully, gesturing me closer. ‘And here come more of them.’

We lean in to see if one of the flies will settle on an ant head and begin to lay eggs. If it does, the larva will develop inside the head and nourish itself on the brain, eventually causing the head to detach and tumble to the ground, releasing a new fly to torment still more ants. But the pattern of frenetic activity among these particular flies never quite matches that of the ants; they just fly in erratic circles. ‘They’re confused,’ Perfecto says finally. ‘Different phorids attack different types of ants to lay their eggs, and this isn’t the right type of ant for these flies. They’re very specific.’

I suddenly feel a sharp stab at the back of my neck. I had been cautioned by my hosts not to let branches and leaves brush up against me if I want to avoid intimate contact with the Azteca. Perfecto and John Vandermeer are ecologists at the University of Michigan who’ve long been probing the interactions among living things on this organic coffee plantation near Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala — they are marital partners and my guides on this outing. The Azteca avoid soil — ‘they don’t like to get their tootsies dirty,’ Vandermeer quipped — and navigate the plantation via trunks, branches, leaves, twigs on the ground, and the huge roots of the sope tree, which rise out of the soil like knee-high, serpentine walls. I realise that I must have let part of the tree touch me as we were talking. ‘They don’t sting,’ Vandermeer tells me, looking slightly amused. ‘They bite and then turn around and inject some poison into the wound.’

I retreat to watch Perfecto and Vandermeer do their work in the doughnut of greenery around the sope. I stand far enough from trees and coffee plants and fallen branches to be safe from the fierce Azteca, the scourge of the plantation’s workers. I eye the ground nervously, as one of the first stories I heard when I arrived was of a former student returning from a day of field work, who dropped her knapsack on the field-station floor and recoiled, horrified, as two coral snakes oozed out. So I poke my walking stick in the piles of leaves nearby to make sure I don’t step on a coral snake



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