“CRIME SCENE” MORE THAN 3,000 KILOMETERS AWAY
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“Opportunity” presented itself in the form of an entire head of a dead ant whose “unusually large” jaws were still embedded in the flesh of one of its nearly amputated fingers.
The scientific team delivered the discovered remains as forensic evidence to J. Manuel Vidal-Cordero , an expert myrmecologist at the Doñana Biological Station, for identification in the laboratory.
“I didn’t know the origin of the specimen, but I was curious because it was clearly a legionary ant from the genus Dorylus , a group of species distributed in tropical regions of the African continent,” he explained.
These ants are famous for their nomadic character and great aggressiveness, for they attack en masse any creature that meets in their path, moving from one place to another.
As for what the head of a tropical ant was doing on the leg of a Doñana goat herder, the explanation was that goats spend the winter south of the Sahara, where they coexist with these ants, and return to Doñana in the spring to breed.
These birds spend most of their time on the ground and are subject to random and unfortunate encounters with these small but tenacious creatures.
