Turnabout is fair play

Ants - as anyone who has tangled with them and lost the battle can tell you - are pugnacious beasts that can both sting and bite. It doesn't make any difference who or what disrupts ants; they are quick to defend their nest, and whoever comes after them won't get off scot-free.

The tiny pygmy horned lizard is an ant-eater par excellence. You can find them slurping up ants all the way from the Great Sandy Desert to the Deschutes Land Trust's Metolious Preserve, and all the way up on the slopes of Mt. Jefferson. One of my favorite places to find them in the Cascades is Sand Mountain, out behind Hoodoo.

Northern flickers dine on ants like there's no tomorrow. That may seem a little strange, as flickers are woodpeckers, and anyone with a lick of sense knows that woodpeckers eat insects in trees. But flickers apparently enjoy a little diversity and spice in their diet; I have watched them gobble up ants by the hour - literally. As the ants surge to the surface to fight off this thing that is causing rack and ruin to their home, the flicker slicks them up as fast as it can.

While sitting down for a rest after a long hike, I watched formica ants dragging one of their enemies off to feed to their larva: a big fat, female grass spider.

Two ants were expending a great amount of energy pulling it over and through cinders, and soon were joined by several other ants that pushed, pulled and rolled the dead spider along the trail to their home. I think I could hear them singing, "Bringing in the sheaves..."

One of the most bizarre associations I have ever witnessed between ants and beetles, however, happened when I was the manager of Ramsey Canyon Preserve, a hummingbird sanctuary tucked away in the Huachuca Mountains of Southeast Arizona.

I received a call from the Big Boss in Tucson that a VIP of the beetle world was coming to the canyon to search for and collect "ant-loving-beetles" - whatever that was. After introductions and a glass of icewater, we headed up the into the upper reaches of the preserve, and as we passed a formica ant nest, the beetle-loving VIP fell to his knees, thumping himself where his heart is and muttering, "Oh, my god, my god!"

The first thing I thought of was a heart attack. "Are you all right?" I said, patting him on the shoulder.

"Look out, you damn fool!" he shouted, "You'll step on it!"

I looked where he was pointing; there was a strange-looking beetle being hauled along the trail by six or seven ants. When the beetle guy removed a collecting vial from the pocket over his heart I knew why he was pounding on his chest. As he stooped down to push the beetle into the vial I said, "I'm sorry, but you're on a preserve, the Nature Conservancy doesn't allow any collecting."

He looked up at me in sheer disbelief and blurted out, "What do you mean, no collecting! I've just come 3,000 miles looking for this beetle!"

I was impressed with his dedication, so I knuckled under, "OK, but only if you tell me what's so special about that beetle."

If my memory is still as good as my story-telling, it went something like this...

Seems this beetle is a specialist and needed formica ant larva to feed her babies; to achieve that end she staggered up onto the side of the ant nest and changed her chemistry (pheromones), and started smelling like a dead beetle.

The ants, sensing the huge, dead beetle, probably thought they had died and gone to heaven and set to work at dismembering it into smaller pieces. The beetle, however, is constructed in such a way that ants can't tear it apart, even though they really put their hearts into it. The legs and antennae are tucked into grooves, and the eletra (the beetle's hard wing covers) fit so tightly the ants can't tear those off either. So, with no other choice, they were dragging her underground all in one piece - which is exactly what she had in mind.

Once in the ant's nest, said beetle changes her pheromones again, and starts smelling like the ants she's among, who may have suddenly wondered where that huge ant came from, and away she goes, looking for the ant's nursery chamber to lay her eggs in. After doing her duty she dies and the ants get their reward.

The beetle's eggs hatch, however, the grubs smelling like the ants, and eat the ants' larva. When the beetle grubs are ready to metamorphose into adults, they go into the pupae stage smelling like dead formica ants. So the fastidious ants drag those evil-smelling (dead ants) beetle grubs out of the ant colony, and throw them on the outdoor trash heap, and the whole story starts over again.

Ain't Nature grand!