RETURN TO THE BIG ANTHILL 

Wednesday, August 06, 2008 (Napanee Beaver) 

Friday, August 08, 2008 (Picton Gazette)

When my brother and I were kids, often on a Sunday afternoon we would take a long walk back to a field near the woods on our farm and visit the "big anthill". This ant hill had a couple of characteristics about it that made it special enough that it would always beckon our return. The structure was huge, at least 18 to 24 inches in height, but its main attraction was its horseshoe shape, taking up a space at least seven feet long by four feet in depth. Like a house built to take advantage of a southern exposure, this structure was perfectly aligned to face a field that never changed over the years we farmed, because of its value for wiregrass hay, the caviar of forage crops back then. A truly amazing structure that even as a budding naturalist, I realized was a bit out of the ordinary. Somewhere among my photos is one my brother took of me at 10 years of age, pointing to it, almost dwarfed by the structure and the grasses that grew beside it.

Some 50 years later, I am still visiting that anthill. The fence bottom at the location has changed little, but the field beside it that once grew some of our best wiregrass hay has since succumbed to ash saplings and scrub bushes, and is now more difficult to reach. Amazingly, the ant hill is still there. The horseshoe shape has been retained, but is now more a series of smaller colonies, broken by open spaces and tall grasses. No longer is it the continuous horseshoe I remember so well, and is but a fraction of the original structure. Many generations of ants have come and gone, and if only the ones that remain could reminisce about their ancestors and what possessed them to construct such an unusual shape.

The "big anthill" comes to mind whenever I walk the Menzel Centennial Nature Reserve near West Plain, and pass by the huge domes upon approach to the lake. There are perhaps a dozen, here and there beside the trail, many of them crowned with dense horsetails, for this is a rather moist area, along the edge of a fen. One mound even shows evidence of a bird having used it for dusting, a shallow concave shape rimmed by symmetrically arranged dried stalks that once were horsetails.

It seems like such an odd environment in which to find ant hills, as their lair is a series of underground chambers, connected to each other and the surface of the earth by small tunnels. Has food lured these ants to this wet location, and have they somehow evolved to relocate their nurseries, food storage room, and living space, elevated high above the questionable earth that might otherwise be dank at the best of times, and become flooded during spring? Is this why these domes are so high?

Did these domes happen out of necessity, and if so, from where did they obtain the material, if not from below the surface? Normally the colony is built and constructed by legions of worker ants who tirelessly carry microscopic bits of soil and other material in their mandibles, near the exit of the colony, thereby forming an anthill. Was this material brought in from afar to supplement the material excavated from their now above ground tunnels?

There are many species of ants in fields and forest, occupying several ecological roles. Perhaps this is one of them. Some are scavengers, others predators, and some like those at my oriole feeder on the sundeck are nectar feeders. Whatever the species, they are social creatures that form these large colonies by caste, a complex social distinction comprising a single queen who is cared for by thousands of energetic and committed workers. They gather the food, care for the larvae, and attend the queen. For lack of a more descriptive term, there may also be "soldiers" whose job it is defend the colony against invasion.

That communication is a strong attribute is obvious by their decision to build in this moist environment and work out a solution that would keep the colony high and dry no matter what the conditions. Their communication must be an elaborate biochemistry, and likely succeeds through emitting pheromones, certainly a method used to signal a trail to food. Perhaps it works in communicating during construction as well.

At 10 years of age, I doubt that I gave the process much thought when my brother and I would stare in wonderment at the "big anthill" on our farm. We just knew it was awesome, or Coolsville, or far out, or whatever term we used back in those days. Yeah, we really knew how to dig it, man.