Embedded Troops

National Wildlife
August/Sept 2005

THE DEATH MARCH begins in the pale light just before sunrise as the female assassins stream from their temporary bastion concealed deep in a tropical thicket. Raucous birds peer down from the canopy, anticipating the drama that is about to unfold.
All at once, the cutthroats start running, converging to form a powerful front that takes down nearly every living creature in its path. This force of nature has been known to native peoples as padicours, tuocas, tepeguas and soldados. In English, it is the army ants—“the Huns and Tartars of the insect world,” wrote entomologist W.M. Wheeler in the early 1900s. Read the Article