It is worth getting the driver antsΓÇÖ formidable reputation into perspective by quoting the words of Edward O. Wilson, the world's foremost authority on ants as well as the author of Sociobiology:
In answer to the single question I am asked most frequently about ants, I can give the following answer: No, driver ants are not really the terror of the jungle. Although the driver ant colony is an 'animal' weighing in excess of 20 kg and possessing on the order of 20 million mouths and stings and is surely the most formidable creation of the insect world, it still does not match up to the lurid stories told about it. After all, the swarm can only cover about a metre of ground every three minutes. Any competent bush mouse, not to mention man or elephant, can step aside and contemplate the whole grass-roots frenzy at leisure, an object less of menace than of strangeness and wonder, the culmination of an evolutionary story as different from that of mammals as it is possible to conceive in this world.
