The Ants, the Butterflies, and the Wasps

The leaves of the trees rustled in the breeze so far overhead they were inaudible. The sun shone down in spots through the gaps between them and bathed the limbs and lower shrubs and far below, the forest floor, with light. The dead leaves on the ground moldered and rotted into the soil below, and the worms and fungi digested them into soil that fed the trees their nutrients, the roots of trees reaching out to one another under the ground.

A line of ants marched along the forest floor following a trail laid down by the ants who had passed before them. The ants going out met the ants coming back, and they touched antennae to share a message about the food they were going to find and come back with. The ants returned with nibbles of leaves to feed the nest they were all born in. These would be digested and fed to larvae would would mature and the queens who would lay eggs. And the trail flowed out and back, a limb outstretched from the nest to the food.

The ants did not follow exactly the same trail: each strayed slightly from the path laid down by the previous. They oozed across the forest floor like drops of water, dripping one at a time across the dead leaves.

A butterfly fluttered above the trail of ants, searching for a leaf to lay its egg on. Its wings shone in the sun light and cast a tiny shadow on the ground below. The butterfly had found the ants it sought and darted down to a leaf near the ants’ trail, where it laid its egg. The egg would hatch into a larva, and the larva would mature to a cocoon, and the cocoon would burst to release the butterfly. The butterfly lifted off from this leaf and flew to another, near another trail of ants from the same colony, and laid an egg there. In all, it did this a dozen times before flying away into the forest.

In time the eggs hatched, and the larvae emerged from them. These larvae were different from other larvae: they smelled like ants.

An ant that passed a little farther to the left of the main trail than the other ants did caught a smell of a larval pheremone. There was an ant larva on a leaf near the trail. How did that get out here? Very strange. The ant who smelled it picked it up and joined the procession back to the nest. This should be cared for in the nest, not left out here in the forest where it could die.

The ant carried the larva back to its colony, entering the narrow channel and becoming surrounded by millions of its sisters, all churning and heaving over one another, deciding for themselves how to help the colony in its own way. The worker carried the larva down into the ground to one of the chambers where the ant larvae matured, fed by the workers around them. It was greeted by a swarm of workers among the densly packed larvae who took the found larva from it and arranged it among the others. The ant who found it went out of the chamber and the colony to resume its foraging.

The workers fed the new larva along with the others. But this new larva began to behave differently from the others: it began to click and chatter like a queen! The worker ants around it heard its chattering and fed it more. This queen would mature to give birth to many new ants, to enlarge the colony to its utmost. Someday its offspring would leave this colony to head out in search of another colony, another new land where they could begin the cycle of the ants over again.

But this new larva became more voracious. it demanded more and more food, called out louder and louder in the voice of a queen. The workers around it fed it more, scooping up the neighboring larvae and feeding this new queen who would maintain the promise its ancestors had always kept: to birth the ants that the colony needed to survive and spread in the world. The ants had always been this way, and they always would be this way. This was the way of the ants.

The larva grew and its voice grew strident with it. A worm broke through into the larva chamber and thrashed about, unable to find the dirt that surrounded and sustained it in its journey. The worker ants carried the larval queen away first, leaving the other larvae to be crushed by the worm as it floundered.

The new queen continued to cry for sustenance, to chirp and buzz for food. The workers had no choice but to feed it larval workers around it. Obviously the time of the colony’s spreading would be soon, when the new queen would begin to fill the nest with her brood. The old queen was moving towards death, and this new queen would replace her when the time came.

A fever came over the ants; at the entrances of the colony they began to fight one another. The ants that returned from scavenging found their colony-mates at one anothers’ necks, biting one another with their mandibles, ripping one anothers’ limbs off. As they approached, the returning ants were also overcome with rage and hatred; the surrounding ants smelled foreign, like invaders, and each ant attacked its neighbor to protect the nest from the threat.

Above this a wasp hovered, awaiting the moment when its pheremones would spread into the colony itself, bringing the chaos with them. It could smell the butterfly larva in the larval chamber, and its ovipositor hung from its abdomen, plump with eggs. As the ants fought one another, it crawled along the ground, searching for the tiny entrances to the colony with its antennae, drumming them on the ground. When it found one of the minute holes, it frantically drummed into the hole with its antennae, widening enough for it to begin to enter the colony. The few ants not overwhelmed by the wasps’ pheremones rushed to the larval room to protect the larvae, and the ants facing the wasp began to fight it.

Its procession was inexorable, though, and as the workers attempted to protect the larvae, the nascent queen most of all, the wasp rotated its abdomen, striking the queen with its ovipositor and injecting the eggs it carried. The wasp then began to crawl out of the nest, but it was bitten to mangled to death by the ants surrounding it. These began to calm once the invader was defeated.

The nascent queen began once again to cry for food, chattering as only a queen could. The workers regurgiated sweet, sticky stuff to it, and it quieted for a time. It continued to grow and eat through the winter, growing larger and ever larger. Its chattering became bizarre though, and its outer appearance became mottled and discolored. Not that the workers could see it in the total darkness of the colony, but the skin of the larva began to undulate and churn as wasp larvae hatched and moved around within it, eating its flesh to feed themselves.

The larval queen began to burst one day, and out of it crawled the tiny larvae of the wasp. The larval butterfly chattered and screamed in a most disordered way as the wasp larvae at their way out of its flesh. Dozens of them crawled their way out, making for the surface by the same channel their mother had burst in by, since repaired by the diligence of the worker ants. The ants attacked these strange intruders, but they were not deterred in their march to the surface, leaving behind the emptied dead larva of the butterfly who pretended to be a queen. A few of the wasp larva made it out of the ants’ colony and fled into nearby leaves, there to wrap themselves in cocoons and spread into wasps again.

The ants continued to gather their food, sucking the sweet nectar of flowers and chewing through the green leaves of shrubs. Their path traced a sinuous curve across the forest floor on the damp rotting leaves under the tall trees bathed by the warm sun.