Observing Nature Here in Beautiful Tropical….ouch, dammit...Panama
That does it. I’m gonna tell you about my ant wars.
Funny thing. The leafcutter ants that steal leaves from my garden mostly ignore me. Occasionally I’ve offended one of them, and those jaws, I mean mandibles that snip through tough leaves, they bite hard! But there’s no poison, the ants don’t sting me, and the bite stops hurting in a few minutes. A good thing really — you could have nightmares thinking about what they could do. I don’t know where they live: I’ve followed their trail for almost a kilometer, but they disappear into the cow pastures.
OK, no joke. I just got interrupted in my writing IRL by swarming giant wasps. I was looking for a board to put under my laptop in the closet and found a giant paper wasp nest near the ceiling. I gave it a shot of bug spray and ran. The wasps got mad and dive-bombed me, but as angry as they were, they didn’t seem to blame me.
Well, any bug story around here leads to more bug stories, so I’ll mention a couple of other wasp tales. There’s a smaller wasp, attracted to food — mostly sugar, and those wasps dive-bomb me too, and they don’t bite or sting.
There’s an even smaller kind of wasp that does sting. I was taking a walk the other day and was amused to see a neighbor swatting at a bush in her driveway with a broom. She would swat and run back into her house. I walked over and stood in front of the bush, and asked her what the problem was. “Vespidas,” she said. I didn’t need a translation, because one of the little critters bit me on the shoulder. The neighbor noticed. So, this being a macho country, I stayed there and told her that wasps won’t bite me if they know that I’m not afraid. Which turned out to be true, as it has when I’ve done the same in Oregon and California.
I once read, long ago, a story about a guy defending his ranch in Costa Rica from soldier ants. I think that was the kind of ant. My memories of the story are dim, but I think he dug a trench and put gasoline in it and lit it. Maybe it was fiction, but it sure wouldn’t be far from reality. And Costa Rica is the country next door to Panama.
My ant war was more diffuse. Six months ago I had a garden going in my backyard. As the watermelons and sunflowers grew, I spent a lot of time observing the insects. I once counted almost 20 bugs in one flower, including a large bee that was being eaten by assorted carnivorous ants and wasps and even a fungus. There were more than 20, but lacking a microscope I could only see little specks that moved around.
In the course of squatting down and just gazing, some ants would invariably crawl up my legs and start biting. They might bite and sting — I don’t have the eyesight to see if they even have a stinger, but this being Panama, I’d guess yes. They hurt like the fire ants in Florida, and the bites don’t heal. You have to scratch them and let your skin . . . well, I don’t know how, but it sort of pushes the stuff out to dry. Cortisone cream also helps.
Every night I get bitten by assorted bugs. There are the quotidian mosquito bites, which aren’t a big problem here, and a lot of ant bites, and I think the thrips or leafhoppers or I don’t know what, they bite too (and swarm my laptop screen at night). I ran out of cortisone and went out and bought a stronger steroidal cream, and I use it!
Eventually the ants figured out where my kitchen is. That’s how the ant wars started. I’d spray bug spray on the floor under the door from the kitchen to the backyard — an insect Maginot Line. The pesticide worked for half a day at a time. I also poisoned the ant nests outside (they live underground), and I flooded the nests with water sometimes. Those measures almost stopped the ants.
During a heavy rain one day, I went out and tried to drown more nests. Then I retired to my kitchen to do some cooking. That was going fine, until I took a break in my bedroom. While sitting on my bed I was attacked by a flying cloud of the same-looking ants. Flying! The little critters have an Air Force! As soon as they found me they jettisoned their wings. Weird, eh?
That’s my ant war story. The denouement came later (as it should): I learned from reading, and verified by observing, something along the line that wasps and ants are at least distantly related. Don’t memorize that, though. I’m more etymologist than entomologist. Seriously. I’m not being clever, I’m being truthful.
TAKEAWAY: Everything in tropics like Panama with more than four legs is best considered an enemy until proven otherwise. Takeaway two: they’re probably ants.
FRED
