RAIDED BY ANTS.

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 15908, 21 August 1923, Page 6

RAIDED BY ANTS.

A NIGHT OF TERROR

Trhth is invariably stranger than fiction. By the courtesy of the secretary of the British Entomological Society the Danly News is able to quote the following description of the horrors of an ant raid in Tanganyika territory. Mr Loveridge, the writer of the letter, has a house near Kilosa, and on July 3rd he discovered that he was being raided by siafu, or red driver ants. These ants are raiders, they seek their prey by scent, as they are entirely blind. The soldier of the species is distinguished by its enormous square head and powerful jaws, “At 8 a.m.’’ writes Mr Loveridge, “we were, being invaded by siafu, who were entering the stonework base of the house at ft half a dozen different points. Beetles were flying before the advancing hosts with one or more of the red furies attached to their, hind legs. Wretched crickets and small grasshoppers were being dragged off, feebly waving the one or two legs that remained to them. My pet jumping spiders- cleared for their lives with

prodigious leaps. . . . Soldier sentries were stationed at intervals along the lines of the column, waiting with the forepart of the body raised and widely-open jaws for any disturbers.” Mr Loveridge swept back the columns in heaps, cremated them with paraffin, put paper soaked with prussic acid in their holes, and believed that he had stopped the raid. But at 9 p.m. that evening he became conscious of a strange noise. The whitewashed walls of his bedroom were a moving mass of ants: the sound was made by the feet of the countless multitude. The raid continued the next day, and at 8 p.m. a stream of ants, six or eight ants wide, was seen going straight up the verandah wall beneath the roof. In spite of his placing the legs of his bedstead in pans of water, the ants reached him. They threw a bridge composed of living ants across the waterpans, over which the infantry columns crossed. The invaders attacked the pet crocodiles, the tortoises,and killed a nest of young rats. “It made me shudder to think of the awful death scores of small creatures were dying,” says the writer. He himself was driven from the house by ants swarming up his legs. The soft-shelled land tortoises suffered badly, one having its eyelids eaten. 'Hot ashes, cyanide powder, meat baits and fire were employed against the horde, but on July 7th the besieged were horrified to see ants arriving in countless thousands in every direction from east and south. Thirty steady streams were moving on the house. Grass was fired in their tracks, and they were driven underground. By 10 p.m. the raid was over. Not a single siafu was found in the house, though they could be heard in the dry grass 30ft. away. “The discipline and organisation of the army,” says Mr Loveridge, “were beyond reproach.”