INVASION OF
BIG-BOTTOMED ANTS
The rainy season's first soaking rain came eight
days ago. The next morning, last Friday, I walked to town to buy fruit and was amazed by
what I saw on all the streets and sidewalks: Millions and millions of dark, amber-colored
insects lay dead. A few remained alive but they were so lethargic that they seemed ready
to die at any moment. They were the size and shape of wasps but up close they were clearly
ants, despite their inch-long wings. You can see some dead ones on the sidewalk next to a
floodlight at the cathedral below:
Ant colonies produce lots of winged male ants to mate with a few winged females. Once
mating takes place the females fly off to find ground suitable for tunneling into and
starting a new colony, but the males simply die. Therefore, the dead ants in the picture
are dead males after the previous night's nuptial flights. You can review the ant life
cycle at http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/TOOLS/ANTKEY/biolmeta.html.
Apparently the emergence of our ant species' winged males and females is coordinated
with the advent of the rainy season, for everyone I spoke to knew about the big, winged
ants who emerge with the first rains. Don Gonzalo called them hormigas voladoras,
which just means "flying ants," but I also heard them called Tatanrías.
Back at my computer an image search using the keywords "flying Mexican ants"
immediately turned up a picture of my ant, posted at the ant forum of the What's-That-Bug
website (http://www.whatsthatbug.com) by
Stefanie here in north-central Mexico. Dave Gracer, who promotes the eating of insects at
his entomophagy website at http://www.slshrimp.com/
identified the ant as the genus Atta, or leaf-cutting ant, and said that it was
edible. Dave also wrote that in Colombia our ants are called Hormigas Culonas, or
"Big-bottomed Ants." You can see in my photo that our ants' abdomens are indeed
big and rounded. In fact, judging from the size of the greasy spot they form when run over
in the streets I'd say that there's a good bit of food value in each ant.
A search on "Hormigas Culonas" turned up an entire Colombian website just on
Big-bottomed Ants. It's at http://www.hormigasculonas.com/english_version.htm.
In pitiable English the producer of that site extols the ants' good taste: "When
the towns smell to the toasted ant frangances, it does people in the region say: CULONAS
ARE BEING ROASTED!"
People here eat them, too, though not as avidly as once they did. It's funny how often
people at first react with a laugh when I mention their edibility, but then later in the
conversation offer their own recipe. Consensus seems to be that culonas are best lightly
salted, then roasted atop a comal (a flat, metal plate, often an excised
metal-barrel head, suspended above a fire). Just spritz with hot-sauce and eat.
Cristina at the Reserve says that the ants stink when they gather in such numbers. The
Columbian website author expresses a different opinion about the odor, saying somewhat
cryptically, "maiden sex smell that wake up the senses; reminiscence of loving
rituals fragrances of any lover that want itself." I think he's saying that this ant
also has aphrodisiacal properties. |