Recapping the recap: Bears and bugs. And booze.

I've encontered the very common, rather abundant alcoholic form of Mount Kilimanjaro and I'm having to bravely face its draining cliffs and tiresome inclines so bare with me.

When we were in Ngorongoro Crater, there was a Safari car ahead of us that contained tourists from somewhere other than Africa.  A rather bulky, earnest fellow and is seemingly disinterested wife who was seen sitting in the back looking at her nails.  At this point in time, everyone had stopped to strain their eyes to see the rare rhino off in the distance.  The gentleman to that I refered to previously made several outbursts during our observation period.  One of them was in reference to the vervet monkey: "Look! Look (name of disinterested wife)! The blue-balled tiny monkey!"--My biology teacher Leslie quietly attempted to correct him--"Oh oh, the Blue-Balled Vervet Monkey!!" He was not mistaken.  The animal in question does in fact have gonads with a robin's egg blue tint to them.  Somewhat startling  the first time you see it but you get accustomed to it.  Shortly after his astute observation came another, more astonishing from my (and hopefully our) perspective.  Close to the rhino were several colobus monkeys. Colobus monkeys have long tails and are mostly seen jumping around in trees with surprising finesse and agility.  Colobus monkeys are black and white in color, weigh between 20 and 30 pounds, and have anverage length of 30 inches (http://www.awf.org/content/wildlife/detail/colobusmonkey).  Colobus monkeys are monkeys.  The guy we've been discussing thought he saw something a little bit different: "Oh wow! Oh wooow! Look, next to the rhino! I think... Yes! There's a bear there!" There is not a single bear in all of Africa.  You'd have to go all the way to Spain to find the closest bear.  In fact, the only native bear to ever exist in Africa, the Atlas Bear, went extinct sometime in the 18th century.  To this man's credit, the Atlas Bear was very small compared to the North American Brown bear, one of its closest cousins.  I, however, have no sympathy for this guy's dumbfounding ignorance.  To our surprise, this family was not from North America.  Our group left in suppressed giggles.

Now, on to the second part of my alliterative title.  We probably won't reach the third part.

The insects of East Africa have all made their way into my entomological heart. Well, most of them.  I have seen hissing safari ants, walking sticks, camel spiders, real spiders, driver ants (truly terrifying when you imagine them the size of a person.  Actually, most six or eight-legged (coined a word? (paranthesis for emphasis)) creatures are terrifying when you imagine them as human sized animals), a praying mantis, moths, parisitoid wasps (just as terrifying being the size they are), bees that instill cold fear due to their size, giant millipedes, termites (winged and non-winged), ant lions, aphids, butterflies, stink bugs, dung beetles, locusts, roaches, tsetse flies, worms, caterpillars, and grasshoppers that could eat your face if they didn't eat plants.  Thankfully, they all do.  I'm sure there are more that I didn't mention but that's enough for right now.  The ants are my favorite.  Safari ants get their name from the devastating raiding parties they conduct.  They go on trips in large groups, hence Safari, and raid nearby termite mounds or whatever else they find.  They will often return to the same mound to milk it for all its worth, which is a shit ton of termites, similar to the relationship the U.S. has with countries that have natural oil wells.  The Safari ants also make this horrific hissing sound by rubbing thier mandibles together whenever they are disturbed.  I love it.  So far we have only seen one caste of this species of ant: the worker.  Some species have multiple castes, or ants that have specific jobs, within their social culture.  Driver ants, or Siafu as they are called in Tanzania, have 5 castes: major workers, minor workers, soldiers, male ants, and the queen.  Another interesting thing about ants is that they are all female except for the rare males who's only function is to impregnate the queen.  Completely matriarchal.  Driver ants never stay in one spot for a significant amount of time.  They are constantly looking for new food sources to feed their teeming masses, which can add up to 22 million.  These ants swarm whatever crosses their path and strip the food source bare in seconds.  They can travel up to 20 meters in one hour.  The queen is the largest ant in the world, measuring up to 5cm.  She lays between 1-2 million eggs a month and can live for up to 15 years.  That's a lot of ants.  Also, all of the ants except for the males and qeen are blind.  They communicate with pharamone trails and lead each other to new places.  The soldiers are so strong that you can feel the tug if you put a stick between their massive jaws.  If there was a hivemind that controlled all these ants, the terristial life of this planet, aside from plants, would be finished in days.  So cool.

I like ants the most because of their sociology.  They are perfectly selfless animals that perform their duties in order to provide enough for the rest of the community.  For example, driver ants create living ladders and caverns when they create temporary nests.  Ants will cling to each other to create a path for others to deliver food and carry the infants.  Workers feed the soldiers because their jaws are too big to ingest anything.  I'm not trying to draw a prallel between military personelle and civilians, but humans could learn a thing or two from the way ants operate. 

It's also really cool to watch them swarm and devour something.

Now I have entered the troubling climb to the summit of Kilimanjaro and I'm feeling a little discouraged.  So I will leave you, my loyal readers, with a Swahili lesson.

Ninahitaji kwenda kulala.
I need to go to sleep.

-George