Legion Ants
The unstoppable swarm of the Zone frontier
The jungle knows two purifications: by rain and by Legion.
The Legion Ant is a unique variety of the ant species. Individually, they are much larger and more robust than typical formicidae species, but what makes them truly memorable is their capacity for collective organization and coordination. During the floods of monsoon season, colonies of Legion Ants sweep the borderlands of the Deep Zone in swarms numbering in the millions. The largest of these swarms range across miles of territory and at times have been known to pose a threat to human settlers.
Basic Information
Anatomy
The workers of this ant species are over one inch long and covered in tiny bristles. Like typical ants, their bodies are segmented into three parts: head, thorax, and abdomen, and all of these parts are coated in a sturdy, chitinous exoskeleton. Aside from the size of Legion worker ants, they should be noted for their broad mandibles, made for grasping or hacking at food. The Legion soldier ants are even more formidable. They grow to a length of three inches long and their sharp cutting mandibles are over half an inch in length. This means that the soldier ants can essentially bite through human skin with a single masticating stroke.
Biological Traits
Aside from their powerful mandible jaws, Legion soldiers are also armed with stingers that produce and secrete a painful venom. The stinger extrudes from the thorax, where the venom toxin is produced and stored. Soldiers can also administer this venom from their mandibles. When used against small insect prey the venom has an essentially paralytic effect. Against larger animals it is still quite painful but not exactly debilitating.
Genetics and Reproduction
Legion Ant colonies are sustained by one fertile queen that lays over 10,000,000 eggs per month. Male drones are drawn to the scent trail of travelling Legion colonies and pursue them in order to mate with their queen. When drones approach the queen's bivouac, however, the workers seize the drone, tear his wings off, and carry him to the queen for mating. Males taken in this way are essentially enslaved by the colony, where they must remain and mate until they die or are discarded.
Ecology and Habitats
Legion Ants inhabit the arid plains of the Cruz River Valley. During winter flooding, the Legions are driven from their stable foraging grounds and begin to range across the Zone Marches in search of food. They prefer dry soil and thrive in vegetative jungle undergrowth where prey is abundant.
A colony never forms a permanent stationary nest and instead creates temporary bivouacs composed of half a million interlocking bodies whenever the swarm stops moving. These bivouacs are frequently formed inside underground tunnels and in jungle caves. The soldiers take position around and on the surface of the bivouac and the workers clasp legs together to form the structure itself: a sphere of interlocking ants with smaller concentric spheres inside. The queen and her slave drones occupy the center of the bivouac.
Dietary Needs and Habits
Legion ants typically prey on other insects and bugs as well as smaller animal species. They will attack larger animals if they have the opportunity and/or they feel threatened. Workers and soldiers that encounter a large threat will secrete a "danger" pheromone that causes additional soldiers to swarm the potential threat/target. The superior numbers of the colony will usually cause the intruder to retreat, but if the threat does not flee the Legion goes on the attack.
Human beings are generally fleet footed enough to evade an approaching swarm but a person who is lamed or otherwise unable to get ambulatory is in serious danger if faced with an attacking swarm. Legion Ants will engulf their prey head to toe and begin coordinating an attack. The workers will start taking tiny gouging bites of flesh while the soldiers concentrate on excretory zones such as the nose, mouth, and eyes. The soldiers attack using their stingers and mandibles and use their venom to try to incapacitate or kill their victims. Consciously suffering under a determined Legion Ant attack would be a truly agonizing ordeal that could potentially take hours before the mercy of death finally takes hold. Once a victim is incapacitated the ants enter the mouth, nose, and eyes and proceed to suffocate/devour their prey from the inside out.
Additional Information
Social Structure
Legion Ants are like other ant species in that they follow a rigid social hierarchy. The queens are the undisputed masters of the colony and no colony will sustain more than one queen at a time. Soldiers are next in the social order and are allotted better choices of food than their worker companions. Workers tend to the eggs and larva of the colony and sustain the queen and her drones. The drones form the lowest social category in the colony's social organization. When drones are no longer able to mate, the colony simply discards them and moves on. If a banished drone tries to follow the colony, the soldiers will kill it and feed its body to the larva.
Uses, Products & Exploitation
It is quite easy to harvest straggling Legion Ants and Deep Zone tribes are known to capture these ants and keep them for a few significant purposes. The most common of these uses involves the extraction of stinger venom. Though quite painful if administered straight from the stinger or mandible, once the venom has been extracted and diluted it can be used for its numbing properties as a fairly reliable analgesic.
The other notable human use made of Legion Ants is as a surgical suture. This property was discovered by an Azoturian Zoner who survived a Legion Ant attack. When he tried to pull biting ants off of his skin he found their bodies would snap apart leaving the biting head and jaws still lodged in by the mandibles. He later surmised that the powerful mandible jaws of the Legion workers, which lock so very fast, can actually be used as staples to seal wounds.
To employ this treatment, a skilled physician places a healthy Legion worker against a cut such that the mandibles close on either side of the incision or laceration. Once the mandibles dig in, the physician twists the thorax and abdomen off leaving the head and jaws locked against the wound. Many Legion Ants applied in this way can create a surprisingly reliable suture that will last for weeks and allow natural blood clotting and tissue growth to heal the cut. Combined with other wound dressing and cleaning therapies Legion Ants are an invaluable tool for treating basic wounds.
Perception and Sensory Capabilities
Legion Ants are blind. Their chief sensory aid is their powerful sense of smell, which they also use to communicate through a sophisticated language of pheromone signals. A lone ant is fairly helpless in the world, but a full swarm is constantly cycling through patterns of sensory information conveyed through pheromone secretions, which allows Legion Ants to communicate rapidly across significant distances and react en masse against localized threats.
Symbiotic and Parasitic organisms
Most humans dread the threat of Legion swarms but shrewd farmers settled in the Zone Marches welcome Legion foraging season, which occurs between harvest and planting times. These homesteaders will wait for the winter arrival of the Legions and temporarily abandon their homesteads for 2-3 months. Moving with their livestock they essentially become seasonal nomads. They know that in their absence the Legions will scour their land of parasitic grubs and scavenging rats and other vermin. When the Legions recede back to the Cruz Valley, the farmers reclaim their own farms and resume working in lands perfectly prepared for planting. Thus Legion Ants are ideal spring cleaners.
Scientific Name
Eciton family
Average Length
1 to 3 inches
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