“Okay, so we’re going to bleed to death if we don’t get the hell out of here fast,” Rick Hutter said, as they hiked along. “And we can’t find a damn supply station. Plus we’ve got a psychopathic giant looking to kill us. And I’ve got a blister. Is there anything else I need to worry about?” he asked, sounding very sarcastic.
“Ants,” Kinsky replied calmly.
“Ants?” Danny Minot broke in, his voice quavering. “What about ants?”
“Ants are a problem, I’ve heard,” Kinsky answered.
Rick Hutter stopped in front of a large yellow fruit lying on the ground. He looked up and all around. “Yes!” he said. “That’s a chinaberry tree. Melia azederach. The berry is highly poisonous, especially to insects and insect larvae. It contains around twenty-five different volatiles, principally 1-cinnamoyl compounds. This berry is absolute death to insects. It can be an ingredient for my curare.” He took off the backpack and stuffed the chinaberry into it. The berry filled much of the pack, and loomed out of the top of the pack, a bright yellow ovoid, sort of like a giant melon.
Karen glared at him. “It’s going to leak poison.”
“Nope.” Rick grinned and tapped on the yellow berry. “Tough skin.”
Karen gave Rick a skeptical look. “It’s your life,” she said curtly. The group moved on.
Danny Minot kept falling behind. His face had gotten red, and he kept wiping his forehead with his hands. Finally he took off his sport coat and threw it to the ground. His tassel loafers had gotten coated with mud. He sat on a leaf and started scratching inside his shirt, and pulled out a single pollen grain, and held it between thumb and forefinger. “Does anybody know I have serious allergies? If one of these objects gets up my nose I could go into shock.”
Karen gave a scornful laugh. “You aren’t that allergic! If you were, you’d be dead by now.”
Danny flicked it away, and the grain danced off, spinning as it drifted through the air.
Amar Singh couldn’t get over the profusion of life, the small creatures that seemed to exist in every nook and cranny of the micro-world. “Gosh! I wish we had a camera. I want to document this.”
They were young scientists, and the micro-world revealed a wonderland of unknown life. They suspected they were seeing creatures that had never been noticed or given names. “You could get a dissertation out of every square foot of this place,” Amar remarked. He began thinking he would do just that. He could get himself one incredible PhD out of this trip. If I survive, he reminded himself.
Little torpedo-shaped creatures with jointed bodies and six legs were crawling about on the ground. They were quite small and were all over the place. Some were sucking up strands of fungus as if they were eating spaghetti. As the humans walked along, every now and then one of these creatures would get startled, make a loud snapping noise, and flip high into the air, spinning end over end.
Erika Moll stopped to examine one of them; she picked it up and held it, while it struggled, snapping its tail with vigorous clicking sounds.
“What are these things?” Rick asked, pulling one out of his hair.
“They’re called springtails,” Erika Moll said. In the normal world, she explained, springtails are extremely small. “No bigger than the dot over an i on a page of text,” she said. The animal had a spring mechanism in its abdomen, she explained, that propelled it long distances, helping it escape from predators. As if on cue, the springtail flung itself off her hand, soaring into the air and out of sight beyond a fern.
Springtails kept bouncing into the air as they moved along, disturbed by their footsteps. Peter Jansen led the way. Sweat dripped from his body. He realized their bodies were losing moisture fast.
“We need to make sure we drink enough water,” he said to the others. “We could dry out really fast.” They found a clump of moss hung with droplets of dew, and they gathered around it. They drank from dewdrops, cupping the water in their hands. The surface of the water was sticky, and they had to swat the water to break the surface tension. As Peter lifted a bit of water to his mouth, it heaped up into a blob in his hands.
They came to a massive tree trunk. It soared up from a sprawling buttress of roots. As they worked their way around the roots, a sharp smell became apparent. They began to hear thrumming, tapping sounds, like rain falling. Peter, who was leading the way, climbed on top of a root and came in sight of a pair of low walls, snaking across the ground and out of sight. The walls were made of bits of dirt stuck together with some kind of dried substance.
Between the walls a column of ants was moving, streaming in both directions. The walls protected an ant highway. In one spot, the walls extended into a tunnel.
Peter crouched down and motioned to the others to stop. They moved forward cautiously, until they were lying on their stomachs and looking down on the ant column. Were the ants dangerous? Each ant was nearly as long as his forearm. Not that big, Peter thought; and he felt relieved, for somehow he had expected ants to be much larger than this. But there were certainly a lot of them. They flowed swiftly by the hundreds along their road and through the little tunnel they’d built.
Their bodies were reddish brown in color, and prickly with hair. Their heads were shining black, as black as coal. The odor of the ants drifted from the ant highway like exhaust coming from freeway traffic. The smell was tart and acidic, yet perfumed with a delicate fragrance. “That sharp smell is formic acid. It’s a defense,” Erika Moll explained, as she knelt down, watching the ants with great intensity.
Jenny Linn said, “The sweet smell is a pheromone. It’s probably the colony scent. The ants use that scent to identify each other as members of the same colony.”
Erika continued, “They’re all females. They’re all daughters of their queen.”
Some of the ants were carrying dead insects or pieces of dismembered insects. The food carriers were all traveling in the same direction along the highway, toward the left. “The nest entrance is that way. It’s where they’re carrying the food,” Erika added, pointing to the left.
“Do you know the species?” Peter asked her.
Erika searched her mind for the name. “Um…Hawaii doesn’t have any native ants. All ants in Hawaii are invading species. They’ve arrived here with humans. I’m pretty sure these ones are Pheidole megacephala.”
“Do they have a name in English?” Rick asked. “I’m just an ignorant ethnobotanist.”
“It’s called the bigheaded ant,” Erika went on. “It was found originally on the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, but it’s now spread all over the world. It’s the most common ant in Hawaii.” The bigheaded ant had turned out to be one of the most destructive invasive insects on the planet, Erika explained. “The bigheaded ants have done a lot of damage to the ecosystem of these islands,” she said. “They attack and kill native Hawaiian insects. They’ve nearly wiped out some Hawaiian insect species. They also kill nesting baby birds.”
“That doesn’t sound good for us,” Karen said. A baby bird, she realized, would be much larger than they were as micro-humans.
“I don’t see what’s big about their heads,” Danny remarked.
Erika said, “These ones are minor workers. The majors have the big heads.”
“Majors?” Danny asked nervously. “What are they?”
“The majors are soldiers,” Erika went on. “The bigheaded ant has two castes-minors and majors. The minors are workers. They’re small and plentiful. The majors are the warriors, the guards. They’re large and uncommon.”
“So what do the big-headed soldiers look like?”
Erika shrugged. “Big heads.”
There were so many ants, and each ant seemed filled with inhuman energy. One ant by itself certainly didn’t pose a danger, but thousands of them…excited…hungry…Despite the threat, the young scientists couldn’t help gazing at the ants with fascination. Two ants stopped and tapped their antennae together, and then one of the ants began wagging its rear end and making a rattling sound. The other ant obligingly vomited a droplet of liquid into the other’s mouthparts. Erika explained what was going on: “She was begging food from her nest-mate. She wagged her rear end and made those scratchy sounds to say she was hungry. It’s the ant’s version of a dog’s whine-”
Danny interrupted. “I fail to see the joy of watching an ant blow lunch into another ant’s mouth. Let’s go, please.”
The ant highway wasn’t very wide. They could have easily jumped over it, but they decided to avoid the ant column rather than risk trouble. As Peter put it, “We don’t want an ant to latch on to someone’s ankle.”
Jarel Kinsky had stopped, and he was staring up at the branches of the great buttressed tree, which soared over their heads. “I know this tree,” he said. “It’s a giant albesia tree. There’s a supply station on the other side of
