War! Between a wasp and an ant army.

The last song of a Blue Emperor, as his time has come.

The ants crowded all over a dead blue emperor dragonfly, and long lines to and frow of the ants ran from the dragonfly to their ant nest as they started to strip the dragonfly.
I don't think that there is one house or business over here that is not invaded by these little Small Black Sugar Ants (Lepisiota capensis). Whenever the ants appear in droves inside our house, especially the kitchen and the bathroom, then we know that we will have rain in the next couple of days. The more ants, the more rain, and the ants are reckoned as a pest over here. They are all over in the walls, ceilings, floors, and in the gardens. One dare not sit on a blanket in a park with a picnic basket, if it is not kept closed then one can expect to find an army of these ants inside the basket.

I took this photo in our "A Guide to the Dragonflies & Damselflies of South Africa" book (ISBN 978-1-77584-184-5) to show you what the Blue Emperor dragonfly looks like in life. It is the biggest dragonfly that we have over here, and this is a male.

Okay, I have explained what happened above and now let's see the start of the wasp war.

Suddenly, this European Paper Wasp (Polistes doninula), appeared out of nowhere.

The soldier sugar ants put their boxing gloves on, and the fight started.

No ways would the ants allow the wasp to lift that dragonfly, as they were there first.

The odds that the wasp had to fight, was about 200 to 1.

You will see three shots below how frantically that wasp tried his best to grab the dragonfly.

Yay! The ants won the battle and the wasp disappeared.

Unbelievable, isn't it? Those tiny ants do not back off from larger predators, as here you can see that the ants won the battle. That wasp had no chance, and I supposed he flew off to try to get some prey somewhere else. I just hope that the somewhere else is also covered with ants, as then the wasp will have to go sleep hungry. The European wasps are invasive, as they don't belong here.

Let's see what Wikipedia has to say about the European wasps.

The native range of P. dominula covers much of southern Europe and North Africa, and temperate parts of Asia as far east as China. It has also been introduced to New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and North and South America. Since the mid-1980s, the population of P. dominula has expanded to rather cooler regions, especially towards northern Europe. Global warming is speculated to have raised temperatures of certain areas, allowing P. dominula to expand to originally cooler regions.

Source

We would rather have the little ants around instead of those invasive wasps, and recently their presence has intensified to such an extent that there are warnings out for spotters to report the presence, especially the nests of the wasps. I am sure the ants wouldn't mind :)
Such is life.

I hope you enjoyed the pictures and the story.

Photos by Zac Smith. All-Rights-Reserved.

Camera: Canon PowershotSX70HS Bridge camera.

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