Guest article by Eric Rounds, a visitor at one of the Finca Leola plantations.

If you visit Costa Rica, you're going to see ants. There are more ants in Costa Rica than there are people by an incomprehensibly wide margin, so you should expect to find ants everywhere you find people and in many places where people are pretty scarce. During my last visit, I saw ants everywhere I looked...from my huevos revueltos one morning (marvelous crunchy texture, an interestingly piquant aftertaste and undoubtedly rich in formic acid) to the darkest heart of a patch of tropical jungle I stumbled through one afternoon.

One valuable lesson I learned regarding Costa Rican ants is that size doesn't necessarily matter. One afternoon while poking around among the aerial roots of something that looked like a stubby palm tree, I noticed three teensy ants on my arm. Like a lot of Costa Rican ants, they were scurrying around with amazing speed and to simplify my observations, I brushed two of them off my arm so I could focus all my attention on the remaining ant. After dashing up and down my forearm a couple of times, it finally came to a halt in the crook of my arm, right on the soft tender skin beside that vein they use for blood donations. I lifted my arm and tilted my head back to get the bifocals properly aligned and to my amusement saw that it was biting me. The bite was so feeble that if I hadn't been looking directly at it, I wouldn't have noticed it was biting me at all. After what looked like a heroic struggle to get its mandibles engaged to its satisfaction, it abruptly curled into a little ball, no bigger than the head of those pins they scatter about in dress shirts.

Fascinated by its actions and thrilled to the core at being so directly involved with an authentic Costa Rican wild animal, albeit a rather small one, I barely noticed the first little tickle of pain. In that smug way we have when looking at very small things, I found it's Lilliputian ferocity rather amusing. It wasn't until it felt like someone was pouring a cupful of boiling water onto my skin that I realized my New Best Friend might not be as cute as I'd first thought. I reacted with catlike reflexes, leaping backward away from the tree and simultaneously striking out with my free hand at the horrid little wretch to keep it from devouring my whole arm. Unfortunately, as I leaped nimbly backward I caught a heel on one of the aerial roots and landed flat on my back in the leaf litter. When I finally found my glasses among the leaves and got them back in place so I could see again, I discovered that not only was the ant still curled up in the crook of my arm, but judging from the number of little red welts surrounding him had continued stinging through what was probably the ride of his life.

As a guest in a foreign land, I can only say that I am deeply ashamed of what happened next. Without a moment's thought as to how my actions would affect the locals and their relationship with the ants, without even the most fleeting concern as to the impact it would have on the microecosystem of the tree, indeed without any thought whatsoever as to the consequences of my act, I snuffed the little SOB. Not only did I kill it, I did it so thoroughly there wasn't so much as a smear of ant goo to be seen on my arm. As if that act of gratuitous violence weren't bad enough, I unleashed a string of profanity that would have made a sailor blush and never even thought to attempt it in Spanish. (By way of extenuation on that point, I can only say that I simply don't know the Spanish equivalents, and even in my pain-crazed state realized that shrieking "¡Pura Vida!" was inappropriate.)

Like so many things in life, in retrospect I can see it clearly for what it was: an epiphany of the first order. It is a rare event that allows one to so suddenly gain insights that can be applied over a range as extensive as that occupied by those little ants. It also opened my eyes to the problems even a well-meaning North American faces when trying to interact benignly and positively with the natives of a foreign country. Given the nature and scope of the insights gained, I have to count it as a powerfully positive experience in my life, but at the same time I sincerely hope my little cautionary tale will help others avoid the awkwardness resulting from duplicating my discoveries.

For the scientifically inclined:

The little red welts, eight of them by actual count, each one about one quarter the size of a pencil eraser, continued burning for about two hours but by the following day, the only evidence of my encounter were eight miniscule little scabs...I imagine where the stinger had entered. Even with my newfound respect for the creatures, I had several further encounters with these treacherous little beasties while in Costa Rica, but none was as dramatic or edifying as the first. It may be nothing more than my imagination, but I think the severity of their stings diminished in subsequent interactions so there's a possibility that one develops an immunity to their venom. That may only be the result of the surprise factor in that first encounter so if anyone has sufficient curiosity to test the premise further, I'd be delighted to hear your findings.

Eric Rounds

This article is one of a series on life in the campo, or country living in Costa Rica, as my wife and I experienced it on our visits and after moving to Costa Rica. We are Fred and Amy Morgan, originally from the US. We bought a dairy farm in Costa Rica to plant trees in its pastures, then later caught a dream of turning all the land we can to permanently protected, sustainably maintained forest once the plantation trees have been harvested for profit. We make most of the wood from the plantations into furniture, flooring, and other wood products

Up