Handy antidote

Natural History, Dec, 2002 by Jack (American boxer) Johnson

The bala ants of Costa Rica, described in "Bites of Passage" ["Endpaper" by Nathan Welton, October 2002], sound like Venezuela's veinticuatro (meaning "twenty-four") ants, so called because most people spend twenty-four hours in bed after being bitten by one.

In more than thirty years of jungle adventures, I've suffered numerous stings by many kinds of insects. I was once on a mining dredge out on the Caroni River in eastern Venezuela and was picking up a diamond-sieving screen when my finger trapped an unseen veinticuatro under the screen rim. The sting caused an immediate searing pain. The instant I removed the big stinger, along with the attached ant, the pain lessened. But within fifteen minutes my armpit started aching and I was getting nauseous. And I didn't have the one item I almost never fail to carry when I'm out in the jungle: an onion.

Luckily the camp boat came by fifteen minutes later, and I jumped in while it was still a few feet from the dredge. The driver didn't hesitate when I shouted "Camp!" My appearance showed something was very wrong. The second I saw our cook, I gasped, "Veinticuatro," and she knew what to do.

The cook made a poultice of crushed onion and, without doing any suction or cutting, bound it over the site of the sting. For good measure, she also gave me some peeled sugarcane, another local remedy, to chew on. Within half an hour I was mostly free of the effects of the ant venom.

Jack Johnson
San Rafael, California