The Weaver's Tale, Aad the Ant Hunter(collecting weaver ants in Thailand)

摘要

While he was at primary school, Aad once took a live centipede into class with which he terrorised the girls. Naturally, it was not long before the teacher sternly requested our hero to step up to the front of the class. Eying the multi-legged arthropod, the teacher forced Aad to stuff the wriggling creature down the front of his pants!!!This you might think was enough to ensure a young boy would shun creepy crawlies for the rest of his days. But, no, thirty years later, having done his chores on hismother's fish farm, our incorrigible arthropodologist regularly grabs a five-metre long bamboo pole and a plastic bucket, hops on his motor bike, and hastens to Sikhoraphum's public park to collect what are known in Thailand as "ant's eggs". These are in actual fact ant cocoons containing protein-rich pupae, which are offered for sale in the local market.The sheer number of ants in a robust weaver ants' nest, a cylinder of leaves sewn together high up in a tree, makes the theft of their cocoons a task that is well beyond the scope of the faint hearted, for the agitated ants don't justtake to the nearest foliage en masse -they drop off the tree onto whatever, or whomsoever, happens to be at a lower elevation.