The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

A white-plumed antbird (Pithys albifrons).
“They’re as confused as we are,” Cohn-Haft said. He speculated that
the ants had been moving their bivouac and had now gone into what is
known as their statary phase. During this phase, the ants stay more or
less in one place to raise a new generation. The statary phase can last for
up to three weeks, which helps explain one of the more puzzling
discoveries to come out of the BDFFP: even forest fragments large enough
to support colonies of army ants end up losing their antbirds. Obligate
ant-followers need foraging ants to follow, and apparently in the
fragments there just aren’t enough colonies to insure that one will always
be active. Here again, Cohn-Haft told me, was a demonstration of the
rainforest’s logic. The antbirds are so good at doing “exactly what they
do” that they’re extremely sensitive to any change that makes their
particular form of doing more difficult.
“When you find one thing that depends on something else that, in
turn, depends on something else, the whole series of interactions depends
on constancy,” he said. I thought about this as we trudged back to camp.
If Cohn-Haft was right, then in its crazy, circus-like complexity the ant-
bird-butterfly parade was actually a figure for the Amazon’s stability.
Only in a place where the rules of the game remain fixed is there time for