Work assessing wildlife populations and forest health in Tanzania continued this month despite the elements.

Flamingo Land’s field assistants have had to wade to work to complete the important conservation activities that are helping to save a threatened tropical forest.

Flamingo Land’s Udzungwa Forest Project is based in Magombera forest, a lowland tropical forest lying in a huge floodplain spanning thousands of square miles. April and May are the wettest months of the year, presenting many problems for the field team due to flooding. The result is that journeys that are usually straightforward are transformed into miles of wading.

Wading through swamps can be dangerous as they can be inhabited by crocodiles, hippos and the infamous bilharzia snail that carries a nastly illness. Thankfully these beasties are not common in the flooded Magombera forest, however on recent fieldwork in the forest our field team did encounter another menace… army ants! These army ants (or more correctly, “driver ants”) live in swarms of several thousand, each armed with formidable jaws. Far from stopping the march of this insect army, the flood water just causes the ants to find other means of transport. The ants often resort to forming living rafts of several ants clinging together for others to scramble aboard and continue their search for food! While resting on a small island of mud between wading, our poor researcher encountered one of these rafts and was bitten from head to toe.

Would the staff of Flamingo Land theme park continue turning up work work each day if they had to wade several kilometres through silty flood-water full of biting ants?? … Of course they would!!