6/2/2004

Are those ants in your pants or are you just happy to see me?

Filed under: Science — Tim @ 11:38 am

What goes creep in your East African night? What frightens venomous scorpions into fleeing with their tail between their legs? What can consume a large marsupial (possibly an Almiqui) in two shakes of a lambs tail?

If you answered, Pee-wee Herman or Ernest Worrell for any of the above, you’re a sick sick individual.

The Driver ant is of course, the correct answer. These bitchin’ blind six-legged creatures redefine the rules of the food chain. As I briefly discussed their cousins in my abbreviated ode to MacGyver.

After watching “Killer Ants” on the Discovery Channel today these mofos are in need of a major image make-over as they have many beneficial qualities in addition to their painful poisonous pinchers: they can cook, clean and create carbon-copies of themselves (50,000 no less) all in one rotation of terra firma.

So have you hugged a Formicidae today?

siafu.jpg

Siafu’s on the hunt