but now it was like a newly planted garden, because ironically, it had flourished from the former occupation by Supercolony. Its soil, having been aerated by the tunnels and chambers of their nests and then enriched by their decomposing bodies, was ideal for plant growth. Grasses and herbs native to the longleaf pine flatland reasserted themselves among the species that had survived the ant Armageddon. By June, a resurgent ground vegetation formed a thick green carpet over the entirety of the old nest surface. The fastest growing of the summer herbs came into full bloom by early June, and a full cast of pollinators visited to serve them--flower beetles, syrphid flies, sweat bees, wood nymph butterflies, sulphurs, whites, blues, skippers, swallowtails swarmed in as though there had never been an episode of violence and death.
By the height of summer, the grassroots jungle teemed with hundreds of insect species, variously adapted to every major niche. A multiplicity of spiders had settled there to feed on them. Individual species snared their prey in orb webs or tangle webs, or sprinted out from silk-spun tunnels to pounce on unsuspecting passersby. A few lay motionless and camouflaged on flower heads, waiting to ambush bees and other pollinators landing there. The arachnids came in many shapes and sizes, from linyphiid dwarf spiderlings less than a pinhead in size to wolf spiders half the span of a human hand.
Spiders, although wingless, were strangely among the first animals to colonize the regenerating Supercolony tract. A few walked in, but even more oddly, other pioneers arrived by ballooning. The method is widespread and ancient among their kind. When an immature spider possessing this ability wishes to travel a long distance, it crawls to an unrestricted site on a blade of grass or twig of a bush, lifts the rear part of its body to point the spinnerets at the tip upward, and lets out a line of silk. The delicate little thread is the spiderling's kite. The air current lifts and pulls at it until the young spider, feeling the tension, gradually lengthens the thread. When the strength of the pull exceeds its own body weight, it lets go with all eight feet and sets sail. A flying spiderling can reach thousands of feet of altitude and travel miles downwind. When it wishes to descend, it pulls in the silk thread and eats it, millimeter by millimeter, heading for a soft if precarious landing. The risk it takes offers good odds. Sailing aloft under its silk balloon, the spiderling can reach land still uncrowded by competing spiders. Such openness, for a while at least, was the condition of the newly vacated Supercolony territory.
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THE WOODLANDER ANTS were like human explorers coming ashore on an uninhabited island. The abandoned Supercolony terrain presented the starving colony with a rich and temporarily boundless food supply. The Woodlanders were free for a while of competition from other ant colonies. But their bonanza could not be harvested easily. The moving, nervous prey that ants hunt are not the same as low-hanging fruit on a bush ripe for the picking. They can only be subdued with skill and swiftness. As Woodlander patrols penetrated the ground cover, their target species met them with protective devices of anatomy and behavior perfected by millions of years of evolution. Such defenses are legion in variety, and some are designed specifically to thwart ants. Many are ingenious even by human military standards. The Woodlander huntresses encountered slow-moving oribatid mites, which resembled a cross between a spider and a turtle. They seemed to be convenient morsels, but were protected by hard shells not easily broken even by the powerful jaws of an ant. Millipedes--thousand-leggers--were prize catches, but they too were armored, in a different way. Their elongated bodies were covered, like those of medieval knights, with hinged plates that gave a measure of flexibility. If those proved insufficient, the thousand-leggers unleashed poisons, including cyanide, on their attackers. Pillbugs, which are land-dwelling crustaceans, had similarly jointed armor and could also roll themselves into an almost impenetrable sphere. Springtails had tiny soft bodies ready for the eating, but were intensely alert and nervous in manner. They were equipped with a spring-loaded lever on their undersides that launched them into the air over a distance equivalent in human terms to the length of a football field, thence out of danger. Nematode roundworms, the most abundant animals on earth, were everywhere in the soil but too small for ants to gather efficiently. Ground beetles, the