Before I agreed to come to the Ivory Coast to study chimpanzees, I was told that I would be spending the last 3 months studying ants. Since I was very afraid of ants, I was dreading this time, but knew I had to face my fear and get over this ridiculous anxiety now or never. The only difference here is that these ants looked as if they come straight from the film Jumangi. My job was to walk around all day on set transects or imaginary lines on a grid through the forest looking for ant trails or nests. When I found a nest , I would break it open with a long thick stick and wait for the ants to come pouring out in the thousands looking for the perpetrator. It was one of the most nerve wrecking thing to break open the large nests since the ants were extremely fast and smart as to where my location was. I did not have much time to do my study trials so I quickly got to work. The best thing I could do to prevent bites on my hands was to wear some latex gloves, but this hardly ever served the right purpose since they could bite right through the glove and draw blood from your fingers. The first thing I wanted to study was the speed of the ants. This was done by taking a stick of a certain width and length, carving a line on the bottom and top of the stick and placing this stick into the nest. When the first ant crossed the first carved line, I would start the timer and when it crossed the second line I would stop the timer, shake off the stick and record the time. This would be done about 30 times , becoming more and more difficult with each dip, since the ants were now starting to climb up my boots and pants. The best thing to do is stomp your boots together and on the ground so that the ants would fall off , but they always managed to sneak up your leg and into your shirt. After the speed was recorded on a notebook and video camera, it was time to start the second part of the test. This time I wanted to study the yield of the ants which is how many ants will cling on to a stick in a certain amount of time ( 2, 4, 6 and 8 seconds) Once the seconds were up we would throw the stick full of ants into a plastic zip lock and close it quickly, before they climbed out. Later when we had collected all of the bags of ants ( 32 bags) we would count them and let them go free. By the time we had finished collecting the ants some of them had torn a hole in the plastic and started to squeeze out which was frustrating and messed with the research results. Finally after all of the tests and the painful bites, we collected samples of the big soldiers in small tubes of alcohol and headed off in a hurry to find the next nest. Sometimes when we ran out of time or the weather became rough we had to take the ants back to camp and put them in a freezer overnight. This also made it much easier to count the ants since they were frozen still, but after about 3o minutes they would actually start to come alive again like little zombies. By the end of my few months of doing this, my assistant and I had managed to find up to 60 nests and trails of ants. The more we ran these trials the better and quicker we became, but no matter how many times we did this my adrenaline never ceased to spike.
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