the industrious ants

while waiting for the female violet cuckoo to reappear last week in tanay, i accidently disturbed an ant nest.  i was kicking around the smooth stones lining the path, looking for fossils, when i found this under one of them:

(click the photo for a larger view)

the poor things suddenly rushed into a frenzy to bring their clean, white eggs to safety!  amazingly, in less than 2 minutes, every single one of the eggs was gone from the exposed hole! in what seemed to me like organized chaos, each ant had carried egg after egg to a more secure location.  all that was left was clean and bare dent in the soil which had no trace of the treasure that had been stashed there.

pretty cool if you ask me!

(i've heard ant eggs are a delicacy in some provinces, although i've never tasted or even seen them.  seeing how small they are, it must take a lot of ant eggs to make a big enough snack!)

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