Tanzanian Tit bits

Jules watched a fascinating spectacle recently - in the kitchen garden. While collecting some lunch salad, she noticed lots of unusual slugs balanced right on the ends of leaves and branches of the garden. Each large bunch of parsley and rocket had about 12 to 15 large, flat, brown slugs with a white stripe down their backs. We had never seen these slugs before, being much more used to the grey, slimy, unappetizing ones that haunt any vegetable patch. Then she realised that the whole garden was seething with literally hundreds of thousands of siafu - soldier ants. The slugs were making a desperate attempt to escape these voracious predators, but in vain. The ants swarmed all over them and pulled them down to the ground and killed them, feeding on the corpses. Jules was fortunately more successful at evading the little blighters.

The Siafu carried on their bonanza for about 24 hours and sure enough, we had no slug problem after that – nor termite problem, nor aphid problem. A somewhat violent, but effective, natural pest control.


Siafu live in colonies of millions. They are so efficient at what they do that they often have to move the colony, having eaten or displaced all suitable prey in the vicinity.

On a different scale, the ellies have been very much around of late. The locals say its because the forest up higher is full of siafu on the move, and elephant hate being bitten in the trunk by them, so they move down to the drier areas. I suspect the reason is actually more prosaic - the maize crops are ripe in the fields. Too much temptation. One of our bigger acacias is now in permanent horizontal mode as a direct result.
However, it is true that elephant do not like getting the ants on the delicate end of their trunk. Research just published recently suggested that the ants set off in agressive self defense and  focus in on the mucus at the end of the trunk.....and then bite.