Most of us know them as siafu and try to avoid them at all
costs but here are a few interesting facts about African driver ant. A typical column of siafu can contain about a million
individuals ants a column the size would consume about fifty thousand prey
items a day. Their prey item are insects, arachnids’, and warms, particularly
grasshoppers, scorpions and large hairy spiders, but they will often attack larger
prey if they have the chance, typically snakes or other reptiles trapped in
their holes or nestlings unable to fly. Any injured creature is also at risk if
it cannot move out of the ants’ way. A local village tell of cooped chickens or
cows in bomas being stripped to the bone in a matter of days.
Unlike the other ten thousand or so ant species, African
driver ants do not build complex underground nests. This is because they clear
an area of prey quite quickly and need to move from one place to another.
Instead they dig a large chamber underground, and then link their bodies
together into a massive basket known as a bivouac. Inside this mass of siafu
bodies, live the queen and her brood. The brood could be up to a million white
maggots with a huge appetite for meat. Almost every siafu is a sterile daughter
of the queen and these daughters care for the brood, defend the nest and kill
the prey.
These sterile females are all blind. The male are fat and clumsy. The males are produced once a year from special clutch of eggs laid be the queen. These eggs develop into giant winged males that leave the colony on a nuptial flight.Unlike females, the males have very good eyesight, which they need to find a new colony once he has found the colony he must impress the guards with his size, if he fails, they will cut him to pieces and feed the colonies and feed the colonies young with him; if he succeeds, then he will be allowed to mate with the queen, after which he is discarded.
These sterile females are all blind. The male are fat and clumsy. The males are produced once a year from special clutch of eggs laid be the queen. These eggs develop into giant winged males that leave the colony on a nuptial flight.Unlike females, the males have very good eyesight, which they need to find a new colony once he has found the colony he must impress the guards with his size, if he fails, they will cut him to pieces and feed the colonies and feed the colonies young with him; if he succeeds, then he will be allowed to mate with the queen, after which he is discarded.
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