Guyana -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Guyana
My next glance into the pit showed a large toad, squatted on a small
shelf of sand, close to the edge of a crowded column of ants. He was a
rough old-chap, covered with warts and corrugations, and pigmented in
dark gray, with mottlings of chocolate and dull red and occasional
glints of gold. He was crouched flat, with all his fingers and toes
tucked in beneath him. His head was drawn in, his eyes closed, and all
his exposed surface was sticky with his acid perspiration--the sweat of
fear. He knew his danger--of that there was no doubt--and he was
apparently aware of the fact that he could not escape. Resignedly he
had settled on the very line of traffic of the deadly foe, after
intrenching himself and summoning to his aid all the defenses with which
nature had endowed him. And he was winning out--the first vertebrate I
have ever known to withstand the army ants. For a few minutes he would
be ignored and his sides would vibrate as he breathed with feverish
rapidity. Then two or three ants would run toward him, play upon him
with their antennæ, and examine him suspiciously. During this time he
was immovable. Even when a soldier sank his mandibles deep into the
roughened skin and wrenched viciously, the toad never moved. He might
have been a parti-colored pebble embedded in its matrix of sand. Once,
when three bit him simultaneously, he winced, and the whitish, acrid
juice oozed from his pores. Usually the ants were content with merely
examining him. I left him when I saw that he was in no immediate danger.
One other creature was quiescent in the pit and yet lived: a big, brown,
hardbacked millipede. Like the frog, he fully realized his danger and
had sunk his bulk partly into the sand, bending down head and tail and
presenting only mailed segments. A mob of ants were trying vainly to
bite their way into this organic citadel.
For the dozens of grasshoppers, crickets, roaches, beetles, spiders,
ants, and harvest men, there was no escape. One daddy-long-legs did a
pitiful dance of death. Supported on his eight long legs, he stood high
out of reach of his assailants. He was balanced so exactly that the
instant a feeling antenna touched a leg, he would lift it out of reach.
Even when two or three were simultaneously threatened, he raised them,
and at one time stood perfectly balanced on four legs, the other four
waving in air. But his _kismet_ came with a concerted rush of half a
dozen ants, which overbore him, and in a fraction of time his body, with
two long legs trailing behind, was straddled by a small worker and borne
rapidly away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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