The Billion-Stingers

Death by a Billion Stings

The sun is rising in the steamy, verdant jungle of central Serinarcta, initiating the twice a day change of shifts between the creatures of the light and those of the night. Male crickets in the tallest branches begin to vibrate their wings in unison in hopes of luring in their partners, a handful of isolated buzzes and chirps soon forming a chorus and then a roar that carries across the forest. Songbirds - sparrowgulls of all sorts - begin to stir from their roosts in canopy foliage and, as if determined not to be outdone, burst into their own songs. Some whistle sweet melodies, some call with harsh cries, but all defend their territories and call in mates as similar birds have done now for hundreds of millions of years. The crescendo wakes up little furry molodonts which, with wide eyes and twitching whiskers, emerge cautiously from tree holes and nests of sticks and twigs in the crotches of the trees, scenting the damp morning air for the presence of their enemies before scurrying out onto the vines and branches in search of seeds to gather and process with their grinding jaws. Large tribbats with brightly colored faces and wingspans four feet across, having spent the night clinging by their tails in flocks have by now also begun to chatter. They beat their leathery wings a few times to warm up before flipping right side up and pulling themselves up through the canopy by their long wing claws, then clamber as high as they can until the thin shoots begin to bend under their weight. Once they can climb no higher, with a sturdy upward push of their tails and flurry of noisy wing beats they take flight up above the trees, one after another, toward the fruiting trees which they depend on for food. A beetle of some sort, large and colorful and adapted to feed on nectar, alights on a nearby flowering liana clinging as an epiphyte to one of the tall forest trees. It's every movement, however, is being tracked, and the moment it alights a small but fierce hunter pounces, grabs the prey in its forearms, and stuffs it down its gullet. Covered in a layer of fuzzy grey down with half-formed feather quills running down its arms, running on its hind legs but clambering for stability with its clawed arms, it is a young ornimorph bird, caught in an awkward teenage stage somewhere between bird and lizard, though closer to bird, minus its lack of remiges. Though still very much flightless, it practices adult behaviors for which its young body is not quite capable including flight strokes as it bounds from one branch to another - its as yet bare arms meeting hardly any resistance from the air, and in doing so, perhaps mirrors similar creatures which lived long, long ago, in how they looked and acted on their much slower ascent into becoming birds. For while the the dinosaurs took millions of years to take flight, the little ornimorph will probably do so in just a few months.

Lower down in the branches, a pair of quadrupedal metamorph birds with flattened, monkey-like faces, big alert eyes, wide jaws and tiny beaks scurry along the branches, grabbing small purple fruits in their wings-turned-hands and swallowing them whole. They are placental birds, metamorphs now only by name, not by practice. They are descendants of the ornkeys. They have changed very little in form from their ancestor and remain at home in the trees. A single fruit drops from a cluster as one of the birds reaches toward it with an outstretched palm, and the fruit falls. It bounces off a lower branch, startling a basking tribbet of a lizard-like form, which scurries into a crevice in the bark as the fruit bounces up and continues its descent to the dark forest floor below.

The fruit hits the springy rotting leaf litter, rolls a few feet, and comes to rest at the feet of a beautiful black and white dappled circuagodont, among the most derived of the tribbetheres. This one - no larger than a labrador - steps lightly toward the fallen fruit and lowers her head to investigate. Her head is shaped typically for her kind - blocky and wide at the cheeks, tapering to a narrow edge at the front- but her body is a bit different than others before her. She is a forest dweller, having traded her fastest running abilities for some climbing ability. She has evolved more flexible forelegs that can reach above her head to pull down food and elongated clawed fingers, capable of grasping against her palms, in place of hoof-like nails. While she can now climb, though, she is still not especially skilled at it and is more comfortable on the forest floor where she is slower than her cursorial ancestor but has become adept at diving through thick cover to escape her enemies. Determining the fallen fruit edible, she picks it up in her narrow jaws and passes it into the back of her mouth to be pulped. She raises her head again and looks around. Her eyes are bright and alert, her pupils shaped like four-pronged stars, adapted simultaneously to watch both the ground and the vertical tree trunks for any sign of a lurking predator. Upon her back, two infants each no larger than a kitten cling securely to a tufted mane of hair on her neck, wide-eyed and alert but motionless, the patterns on their own hair blending seamlessly into the markings of their mother. Living in a less exposed and so by some degree safer habitat than their plains-dwelling ancestors, they do not need to be as precocial at birth and will cling to their mother's back with their long front claws for much of the next few months.

The calves are still toothless, but their mother sports the typical tooth-formed beak of her lineage, projecting out of her lips, the upper tooth tapering to a narrow cutting blade that strikes against a wider lower plate. Having finished the fruit - just a supplement to her normal diet - she now demonstrates their primary function as she comes to a young sapling tree growing in a sunlit patch in the forest gloom. Like most vegetation in the jungle, its nutritious foliage is kept well out of reach of grazers on the ground, but she is not perturbed. By turning her head to the side and extending her upper tooth forward, she grips the trunk firmly in her jaws. As she pulls the upper tooth backwards, the blade slides down and cuts sharply into the bark. A smaller branch would have been lopped off with just one bite, but a sapling several inches thick is a bit more resilient. Without fully releasing her grip, she slides her upper jaw forward and then back again in a sawing motion until she clips neatly through the trunk, severing the sapling's stem with the efficiency of a set of tree trimmers. As the young's foliage tree collapses alongside her, her infants are startled and raise their heads toward the crash, but there is nothing to fear. Their mother sits down upon her haunch, with her tail-leg out to one side, and after checking her surroundings one last time, pulls the branches up to her mouth with one of her arms and begins to crop the leaves and stems and pull them into the back of her jaws where they will be thoroughly chewed before swallowing. As she feeds, her twin offspring venture over her shoulders and cling tightly to her chest. They nuzzle her mouth as she eats and begin to squeak plaintively. The mother responds by lowering her beak to first one of the begging youngsters, then the other, and for each one unfolding her cheek tissues over the normally exposed tip of her upper beak against the open mouth of the infant in a sort of kiss through which she regurgitates the finely chewed pulp of her meal. Unable to feed themselves at all until they grow their teeth, the infants will depend completely upon her to feed them this way for a period of many months.

When both calves are fed, one returns to her back and nestles in to sleep while mom continues to feed. The other steps off of its mother and tries out its own legs for a moment. It bounds around in the leaves of the felled sapling with an unsteady but very eager gait - it is not quite sure on its three legs yet, but is very determined to explore despite. While the baby rolls in the leaves and chortles playfully, the mother watches out of the side of her eye, keeping one ear turned toward her infant to catch the sound of any approaching predator, while continuing to fill her belly.

The little calf crawls over and leans against the trunk of a large moss-covered tree just a few meters away to the side from its mother who, busy eating, does not make any move to reign it in. There it sits, propped up on its haunch, and picks up a fallen leaf which it sticks in its mouth and moves around in its lips as if pretending to eat solid food like a grown-up. It pays no attention to the narrow, healed-over split in the old tree's bark which goes several feet up the tree from the ground just behind it, and neither does its mother, until the baby begins to scream.

The worst danger facing her child is one she could not hear coming. Frantic at the call of her young one's distress, the mother stands and bounds over to her infant, which is suddenly covered in a swarm of stinging red ants half an inch long that are pouring out of the crack in the trunk like a flood, crawling through the calf's hair and rushing into its ears, mouth and nose. She grabs her wailing offspring and pulls it away from the trunk but drops it again almost instantly, yelping as the growing tide of ants turn upon her now and furiously sting her arms. She frantically shakes and tries to rub them off herself, but some of the insects manage to quickly climb up through her fur, stinging her chest and neck and threatening to reach her other infant that now squeals out, having also been stung on its nose. The first baby squirms helplessly on the ground, its cries muffled as ants fill up its airways, totally engulfed in the tide of stinging insects that rises around it like some sort of horrible shape-shifting carnivorous mass, which continue to flood out from the tree hollow as the infant stops moving. The mother, driven mad by just a few of the insects clinging to her fur, is forced to protect her remaining young and make a hasty retreat.

above: a mother forest circuagodont is helpless to protect her infant offspring from an ambush of the deadly billion stinger ant.

~~~

The ants, acting as a single overwhelming force, form a writhing, shifting mass of bodies around the infant's now still body, almost three feet across and in places several inches deep. The horrible menace is a swarm of billion-stingers, a highly aggressive, carnivorous ant which lives in nomadic mobile super-colonies millions-strong. Whereas most ants have a stable nest site, billion-stingers are of the army ant type that has so often evolved among these insects over their history and which instead build temporary nightly nests, known as bivouacs, by linking their own bodies together as a living shelter, then disassembling to hunt by day. Billion-stingers, however, take this habit to a greater extreme than any ants before them. Whereas other army ants break up their living nest and travel with their queens and larvae exposed when on the hunt, billion-stingers maintain a bivouac form even while traveling, as a percentage of the colony remain linked around the reproductive members of the colony to provide a protected shelter for each queen and their developing larvae - and there may be as many as twenty queens in a colony, each in its own living nest! Each "nest" of interconnected bodies may be six inches long and wide, and is supported by several thousand ants of a highly specialized carrying caste - workers with elongated bodies and very sturdy legs that grow up to an inch and half in length. The carriers walk on their four hindmost legs while propping up the portion of the colony surrounding the queens with their first pair of legs and their abdomens. The line of queens, each secure in their own living palace of interlocking workers, travel along the forest floor like a line of caravans on the backs of the carriers. They are led and flanked by a large number of the large warrior castes, each fitted with vicious hooked jaws for dismembering prey and venomous stings to incapacitate it and fend off threats to the queens.

This colony had been roosting in the tree hollow for the night, and had been roused when the infant had come to sit against their resting place. Swarms of defensive warriors burst from the hollow to protect their queens, inciting a flood of attacks that quickly turned predatory. As soon as the circuagodont calf has been incapacitated by the warriors venom at the front of the swarm, the entire colony descends around its body to feed. Surrounded by the biting, stinging warriors, the carriers pull their bivouacs in all around the carcass and another horde of the smaller workers pours out from them. These workers now begin to relay strips of flesh cut from the dead calf by the warriors back into the living nests, where additional workers remain to take it and feed it to the queens and larvae. These ants, who never leave their nests, are the "nannies" - slightly larger workers whose sole jobs are to care for the queens and their young, bringing them meals of meat brought in from outside and rearing the larvae directly upon their bodies. As soon as a queen lays an egg, it is gathered and stuck onto the back of a waiting nanny and stays there until it matures into an adult ant. By that time, the nanny may be carrying as many as five other larvae or pupae, adding another as each one matures.

It will only take an hour, maybe ninety minutes, for the swarm to strip the small infant circuagodont down to a clean skeleton, at which point the workers will all return to the security of the bivouacs. The leading warriors will choose a direction and begin marching onward again, followed by the carriers and the warriors that line the flanks and bring up the back of the convoy. Unlike most ants, billion-stingers see very well and are not as dependent on scent trails to navigate - rather, they can rely on physical landmarks and so travel truly nomadically, often never visiting the same patch of forest twice. If a meal is large, like this, the whole colony will likely seek a sheltered place and rest, but the goal of the billion-stingers is growth, not merely maintenance, and so its hunger is rarely satisfied for long. Often the swarm will feed and immediately set off in search of its next prey, which ranges from the smallest insects to large animals unable to escape their army in time.

When actively hunting a variety of different techniques may be utilized by the colony to procure prey - some of the success of the billion-stinger likely lies in its ability to switch between several hunting techniques depending on prey species. When hunting assorted small prey, "coralling" is a favored tactic; in this, the warriors of the colony form a long line outwards from the leading edge of the swarm - sometimes up to sixty feet in length - stirring up insects and small animals from the leaf litter and then closing in to trap the prey in a ring of vigorously stinging ants with nowhere to flee. If a single animal is a target, such as a molodont or a flightless bird, the colony may adapt an ambush technique, the ants freezing in place until the prey is close enough to rush and overwhelm - if it does not come close enough and goes the other way, the colony will return to its usual quicker pace until something else comes along. Related to the ambush is the "flush"; sometimes used to drive mid-size prey animals into the waiting army, this technique involves the splitting of the warrior caste into two groups, one of which waits at the head of the main swarm and the other which circles around and attacks an unwary animal from behind, chasing it into the horde where it may be overwhelmed with stings. Very large prey such as adult circuagodonts are targeted only opportunistically, as most animals of this size can readily outrun a swarm and survive quite a few stings, but when successful in bringing down such food sources - most often by chance, such as when one disturbs a roosting colony - the colony can be sustained for several days at a time.

Billion-stingers, though not territorial, are highly averse toward other colonies of their species, a distinction they make by scent. Separate colonies rarely outright battle, however, but make a strong effort to avoid one another and areas recently traveled by a rival swarm. If a single swarm is separated, so long as each retains at least a single queen they will part ways as two separate colonies, though individual ants are able to remember the scent of their kin for at least two weeks and if reunited in that time the colonies will readily rejoin. Separation is also normal in instances where the swarm becomes unsustainable large or in times of food scarcity; rather than risk starvation of some or all of the group, it will splinter into several smaller groups each of which migrates in a different direction, improving the odds at least one will find better hunting grounds - made possible because colonies normally have many queens, each of which can continue the colony's future.

The large number of breeding females in a billion-stinger colony is unusual among ants and is directly tied to being readily able to split and form new colonies when necessary. This adaptation has had secondary effects on their evolution. Rather than producing queens just once annually and having these new breeding females fly off to start a new brood, billion-stinger queens periodically produce additional breeding females as well as flying fertile males, known as drones, intermittently throughout the year. Males fly away but fertile females stay in the colony, breed there, and may never leave at all. Because they are never without the support of a colony, they do not fly at any point in their lives, and so have become especially dependent on the care of their subjects. They have only the tiniest twisted vestiges of wings, which break off shortly after pupating, and cannot walk even when newly emerged - their abdomens are too fat and their legs too stunted. They mate frequently with flying drones from other colonies - and other queens of the same colony too - which fly freely between different swarms, resulting in much higher genetic diversity than other ant colonies whose members are more often much more closely related - often even siblings from a single queen and drone.

Able to operate as a single cohesive unit with remarkable efficiency, to switch between different plans to find prey, and to reproduce simply by splitting apart, without the vulnerable period where queens must start a new colony in other species, the billion-stinger is an extremely successful ant genus common across the northern hemisphere 250 million years PE. A result of the frequent cross-breeding between different swarms, they have a high rate of mutation and are highly adaptable. Some species of billion-stinger are specialized toward the canopy, many toward the forest, some to the open grasslands. They can cross almost any obstacle, including water, by forming a raft and paddling across, and species in temperate climates can hibernate. Unlike similarly vicious predatory ants from Serina's past epochs, particularly those that savaged some of its very first flightless canaries in the Hypostecene, billion-stingers are highly venomous and have very few potential predators, with their main limiting factors being the availability of food; when colonies outstrip the means of their habitat to support them, they break apart, and large numbers of ants may starve. One major limiting factor, however, is competition; the larger a swarm grows, the more unwanted attention it attracts in the form of flying insects, birds, and tribbats which flank swarms to snatch up fleeing prey in their wake. Once a swarm reaches a certain size, it becomes too obvious to kleptoparasites, becomes unable to bring in enough prey to sustain itself, and breaks up and disperses - thus, even without directly preying upon them, the birds and other creatures prevent the billion-stingers from totally toppling their ecosystems.