How One Tiny Insect Upended an Ecosystem
Out on the savannas of East Africa, lions have always loomed large. Clocking in at several hundred pounds apiece and capable of ending a zebra’s life in a single swift bite, they’re veritable food-web royalty.
But in certain parts of their habitat, these hefty carnivores are now under threat from an unlikely and petite new nemesis: an invasive ant, puny enough to fit inside a hollowed-out sesame seed. The two creatures rarely, if ever, directly interact. And yet, the fact that lions are now struggling to hunt their favorite prey “is entirely attributable to these ants,” Douglas Kamaru, a conservation biologist at the University of Wyoming, told me. By—and that, if it continues, could permanently reshape the African landscape. “It’s one little animal, creating an entire range of disruptions,” Ramiro D. Crego, a conservation biologist at University College Cork, in Ireland, told me.
