Ants and Adders

Thursday's Guardian Country Diary is an account of an encounter with ants and adders

This massive wood ant's nest is on the side of a footpath through Hamsterley Forest on the edge of Weardale in County Durham. It's four years since we last followed this path and the nest is now almost a metre tall. There's as much nest below ground as above soil level and it's probably home to well over 250,000 ants.

The nest is thatched with dead pine needles and its surface was covered with ants, either adding more thatch or bringing back honeydew that they'd collected from aphids high in the tree canopy.

These ants attack intruders with great ferocity. This is what happened when I poked a stick into the top of the nest. You can see the powerful jaws biting the stick .....

..... and here you can see how the ant curls its tail underneath, to squirt formic acid at the attacker.

Those jaws are very painful when they grip your flesh, but .....

... not as painful as a bite from this. My wife spotted this female adder sunbathing near the ant's nest. You can see how the snake has flattened herself out to absorb as much of the warmth of the autumn sun as possible.

While I was photographing her I noticed two young adders, about the length of my index finger, slithering away in the grass, too quickly for me to get a photograph. Evidently we were standing in a favourite adder sun-basking spot. At this point the female became more defensive, although it's hard to say whether is was because she was defending her offspring or simply because she was tired of our intrusion in her siesta.

By now the angry ants had caught up with me and were biting myleg, so it was time to leave!

For more on adders click here

Antopolis

Hamsterley Forest http://www.forestry.gov.uk/hamsterleyforest, which lies between Weardale and Teesdale, is home to an enormous variety of fascinating wildlife, ranging from nightjars and crossbills to adders, badgers and deer, but these wood ants are amongst the most amazing and perhaps the most numerous of all the animals in the forest. The bottom photo shows a nest, built of pine needles and often half a metre high. Each nest is reckoned to be home to around half a million ants. The ants’ nests are rather like icebergs, with most of the galleries and chambers hidden below the surface, and in some places there are several nests linked together underground, forming an ant metropolis. The top of the nest seethes with ants, constantly setting out in long columns on foraging expeditions that take them right to the top of tall conifers in search of small insects that they bring back to the brood. Understandably, the presence of these ants is welcomed by the foresters because this free pest-control workforce destroys a significant proportion of the pests that infest conifers, although the ants farm the aphids rather than killing them, collecting the sugary honeydew that the aphids excrete. It’s best not to hang around for too long when you’re photographing these nests, as the occupants quickly find a way up your trouser leg and have a very painful bite. You can read more about wood ants (and access photos and videos) at the following web siteshttp://www.treesforlife.org.uk/tfl.woodants.html
http://www.arkive.org/scottish-wood-ant/formica-aquilonia/
http://www.arkive.org/hairy-wood-ant/formica-lugubris/
http://www.arkive.org/southern-wood-ant/formica-rufa/