Weaver ants – a natural traditional medicine

BY PETER KRANZ

IN MY GARDEN in Waigani I noticed a strange ball – a bit like a football - hanging from a tree in the front garden.

The leaves on the tree looked deformed. They were bound together into ball-shapes, a bit like birds nests. Then the leaves died and it looked unsightly.

A week or so later the leaf-balls had grown much larger and spread further. On closer investigation, I found there were thousands of small reddish-yellow ants inside each one.

Another week passed and the balls had grown larger still, and there were more of them appearing on nearby trees.

Bemused I took a closer look and poked one of the leaf balls with a stick. Some ants fell on my face and started to bite me enthusiastically: quite painful - worse than a mosquito but not as bad as a wasp (refer to the Schmidt Sting Pain Index.).

One managed to get into my mouth and I inadvertently crunched on it. It tasted of lemon juice.

This is a species of weaver ant that lives in PNG and which is both very annoying and has a painful bite.  But it has some interesting properties. Colonies can be extremely large, consisting of more than a hundred nests spanning numerous trees and containing more than half a million workers.

A week later my cousin-brother came to visit.  He had a very bad cold - maybe the flu - and I offered to get him some medicine from the chemist.  But he looked through the window and said ‘no need, my medicine is in your trees’.

He stood underneath one of the leaf-ball nests and whacked it with a stick - whereupon thousands of furious weaver ants dropped on his head and started biting him.  He bravely stayed the course and let them do their work for some minutes, then washed his face.

He said, "That's out traditional PNG medicine for colds and flu".

Apparently you can also put them in boiling water and breath in the vapour, or drink the juice.

Sure enough he got better in a day or two.

It is known in medicine that weaver ants can fight infection and people who live near them do sometimes use them as a medicine. The ants have a strong chemical, formic acid, in their bodies which they use to protect their nests.  In humans it can help to fight infections.

Comments

[Peter Kranz]

Paul - Yes it is rather ironic that westerners criticise medical practices which were common in Europe up till around 100 years ago.

Interestingly the practice of trepanning - or boring a hole in the skull to relieve pressure from blood clots or skull trauma - was widely reported as being skillfully practised in Melanesia in the 19th century.

Sometimes the resulting hole in the skull was filled in with polished coconut shell. The wounds were washed out with coconut water which is sterile.

Thus the patients had a much higher recovery rate in Melanesia than in Europe at the time, which was ignorant of the need for antiseptics in surgery.

From an article on the history of trepanning at trepanationguide.com

_____________

In the Bismarck Archipelago, cranial trephining was reported in New Britain, New Ireland, the Duke of York and also in some of the smaller islands.

The instrument was an obsidian chip, a shell, or a shark's tooth. In New Britain (Neu Pommern) the operation was done only for fracture, usually from a sling-stone.

The opening was scraped with a sharp stone, the fragments blown away, the scalp sutured, and elaborate dressings applied (Brodsky, 1936-8, Crump, 1901, Parkinson, 1907-8; Von Luschan, 1898).

Descriptions of holed skulls, photographs of surviving trepanned natives, and of the operative process are on record.

Trepan instruments from the Bismarck Islands may be seen at the Department of Surgery in the University of Sydney (Brodsky, 1938) and skulls at the Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna (Wölfel, 1925-36), and the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in London.

[Arthur Williams]

In 1980 I was sitting at my desk at Kawito, Western Province, when I heard excited female Gogodala voices.

I looked out of the window and saw they were about to attack one of these ball colonies that had grown on a small bush at the side of the track down to the Aramia River.

They were almost fighting over who would get the biggest piece of the ants' nest.

They ignored the sharp bite of the annoyed insects and squashed part of the nest in their hands before putting the tasty morsels into their mouths; all the time swatting angry ants who were invading under their blouses, skirts etc.

I had never seen my wife's tribe eat these creatures, so she too was amazed at the Gogo girls enjoying them but also told of seeing them eating a purple fruit, smaller than a plum that she alleged her tribe thought only fit for the birds.

Apparently there are some dietary deficiencies inherent in swamp dwelling and tradition has provided the Gogodala with knowledge of natural alternates shunned by other luckier tribes elsewhere.

Mind you, I have ate them singly when pruning cocoa trees when the odd one would fall into your mouth. They do taste sort of lemonlike and someone once told me that their sting was beneficial for your health.

Cannot recall if it was alleged they helped if you had heart problems or perhaps it may have been halitosis.

[Paul Oates]

Many years ago it was felt that a lot of illness was due to an excess on blood in the body. Blood letting was a serious business and barbers used to double as 'blood letters' with their razor blades.

Years ago I heard an account of how George Washington died. Apparently he had a slight cold one morning and the gardener was asked to take a pint or two. George didn't feel any better and so a neighbour obliged with another pint or so.

As he got steadily worse, the surgeon was called who then 'let another pint'. It was noticeable that the blood came slowly and 'was very thick', the official report said after George died.

We now know that that blood is essential to survive and any blood loss has to be replaced as soon as possible before the body goes into shock.

A diet low in iron and combined with endemic malaria and hookworm can lead to anaemia. I can remember seeing people with the palms of their hands almost white.

Perhaps those who feel they need to reduce their essential 8 pints of the liquid of life should go along to the Red Cross Blood Bank and help those who don't have enough? Usually a headache can be fixed with a drink of water.

[Peter Kranz]

Strange but true. On my personal experience of blood-letting.

I was staying with the tambus a few years ago and decided to go the shops to get some supplies. One auntie said - please can you get some razor blades.

I though she wanted to shave her legs or something, so duly brought a packet home.

She proceeded to take one out and put in boiling water for a minute (a wise precaution), then, before I knew what was happening, cut a vein in her forehead and produced about a teacup of blood.

She applied a bandage, then said, 'Thanks - I had a bad headache - that will make me feel better now'.

[Peter Kranz]

Basil - I wouldn't recommend hundreds of bites. Some people suffer from anaphylactic shock when bitten by insects (an allergy to the chemicals in the bites). This can be a very serious condition.

Blood letting is still often used in PNG to 'relieve pressure' when suffering headaches etc. I was amazed to find this still being used by my family, but it is true.

The ant bites may work in two ways. One is by replaced pain - if you have a pain from one thing and suffer another sharper pain from something else, your body forgets about the first one.

The other is that there may be something in their bite which does act as true medicine - which needs further research.

Plus of course the placebo effect - if you strongly believe something will help you, it often does.

[Basil Peutalo]

We call them, in Tok Pisin, kurakum.

That is new information for me. But I must build up strength to allow these ants to give hundreds of good bites.

It is defititely better and maybe healthier than letting blood when one has bad headache.