Any successful venture is bound to gather hangers on. Army ants have an unparalleled entourage of dependent and associated species. Like a circus or a legion of Roman soldiers the ants are preceded, followed and infiltrated by over 500 species thus far described, and undoubtedly many other that have so far escaped our notice.
Ant birds enliven the canopy announcing the oncoming host. They feed on the myriad small arthropods and animals flushed from the rainforest by the ants. 1/
Mixed with the ants themselves you’ll find beetles and mites, riding the workers or doing their best ant impression trying to keep up.
At the center of the column. Obscured from view by her protective daughters runs the queen. One of the largest ants in the world, though, with her daughters on the move she has slimmed down to better run at their pace. She is the source and cause of this wave of chaos sweeping the forest. Every member of the army a daughter. 2/
They act with such a high degree of coordination that the colony is more like a single creature than a multitude. This is what E. O. Wilson called “the superorganism” — a single million-limed monster rusting through the forest, sending ripples into the lives of the hundreds of host species. The colony is so voracious it cannot afford to stay in the same place, again like those Romans, it must always seek fresh conquests.
wherever they rove birds sing “here they come! here come the ants!” 4/4
