Flesh-Cutter Ant
No one knows exactly where the flesh-cutter ants come from. One day, they simply emerged from the sourthern rainforests, attacked a small community and carried away a dozen or so human inhabitants back into the dense tropical growth. Were they some other kind of ant engineered for another purpose, but gone horribly awry? Or did they arise through the contamination the world suffered (be it toxic waste, radiation or some other man-made taint)? Or is it possible that these strange myrmidons have been with us all along in the deepest, darkest heart of the forbidden forests?
The ants themselves are typically 2 to 3 feet in length and 4 to 6 inches in width. Their chitin is mottled black and red. They have long segmented antennae and powerful serrated mandibles. Ninety-five percent of the flesh-cutter ant population are “workers.” The remaining ants are “farmers,” with a single queen governing the colony.
The ants rarely venture forth into human populations, preferring to stay as far away from that world as possible until it becomes absolutely necessary. In the meantime, other animals end up as prey to the flesh-cutters. The ants carry the victims of their paralyzing poison back to the colony, deep underground, where they slowly strip the skin from the creature. They use their serrated mandibles like scissors, snipping swatches of flesh away from the body. They only take as much as they need at any given moment. The ants actually manage to keep the prey alive as long as possible, “feeding” the hapless victim from the ants’ own protein-enriched waste.
The curious thing is, the flesh-cutting ants don’t themselves use the strips of skin as food. The snippets of flesh instead serve a dual function: to feed any potential larvae that require sustenance, and to feed the fungi that the other ants (the “farmers”) cultivate in deep subterranean passages. This fungi (mycogongylidia) consumes the flesh deposits, and then the ants eat the fungus. When the queen is hatching new eggs, she will lie among the underground gardens of fungi, nursing on the growths to keep her strength up.
The colonies of the flesh-cutter ants go extraordinarily deep, as much as a mile or more underground; the tunnels themselves (typically no bigger in diameter than 4 feet) may go on for 10 miles or more. Most of the passages branch off and terminate in either fungal gardens or larvae chambers. The ants reserve special chambers for their still-living prey. When a victim dies (or is alive but no longer has enough skin to be of use), the “farmer” ants take the body back to the surface and discard it about a mile away from the colony’s entrance. There may be up to a thousand ants in a single colony. Typically, most ants attack in a “swarm” of 2d6 ants.
by Claudio Pozas (Gamma World: Machines & Mutants page 33)
Average Weight
2 lbs
Average Length
2 to 3 feet
