WHEN YOU
LOOK
Western Bluebird
The Bullet Ant: Culture that Stings
When you look at this bullet ant, you see potent justice
The bullet ant is inextricably linked to the forest it inhabits. Ants hunt up and along the trees for arthropods, stunning them with their signature poneratoxin. Colonies build their nests at the base of trees, delivering the spoils of hunting back home. Bullet ants are even dependent on the trees for navigation. When given courses involving black-and-white or grey-and-white colorways, ants navigated more successfully in the black-and-white pairing. The findings signal a dependence on the canopy and its sunlit outline for directional cues. A prosperous forest becomes essential to the ant as a home, food source, and a reliable North Star.
Paraponera clavata, or the Bullet Ant (Courtesy of the Orma J. Smith Museum of Natural History)
Despite the incredible pain, some people actually choose to brave the bullet ant’s wrath. For the Satere-Mawe people of the Amazon rainforest, enduring stings is the means by which boys graduate to manhood. In a ceremony known as Waumat, men are challenged to endure hundreds of bullet ant stings. Ants are harvested from the forest, then woven into gloves made from palm fronds. The gloves are expected to be worn for ten minutes while chanting, singing, and dancing in coordinated processions. The ceremony must be repeated about twenty times during a man’s life. While the origins of the Waumat practice are murky, it has been essential to a community decimated by colonialist epidemic and extortion. As one Satere-Mawe man put it, “The ant’s bites function like a vaccine, driving off illnesses and making us better warriors and better hunters.” The procession lasts for ten minutes, the pain for a day, and the newfound resolve for a lifetime.
Waumat Tradition (Courtesy of Mongabay News)
Map of the Andirá-Marau Indigenous Reserve (Courtesy of Mongabay News)
For those tribe members concerned with retaining their rightful land, the Waumat tradition has become a symbol of both solidarity and cultural resolve. Now more than ever, the Satere-Mawe need to fight off “illnesses”. The tribe was demarcated the Andirá-Marau Indigenous Reserve, an area covering 3,044 square miles, in 1986. The land was provided only after years of tribal opposition to commercialization that had polluted and ravaged hunting lands. Sadly, the demarcation only afforded the people a fraction of their native land. When former president Jair Bolsonaro attempted to open up mining and logging leases in the reserve once again, rituals became essential. “We are the first inhabitants of this land, and for us, landowners and loggers are like a virus. And to get rid of the virus, we practice our rituals,” noted one man regarding the importance of the Waumat revival. Time and time again, the bullet ant is needed to imbue the power and vigor of the forest’s will.