Born to be wild. That vintage 1960s song was running through all
of our heads as we sped on motorcycles through a logging
concession just south of Cambodia's newly protected Central
Cardamom Protected Forest (CCPF). We hit 30 miles per hour on
the red earth road but slowed to a crawl as our drivers
navigated the steep rocky trail to our camp. We were a small
Rapid Assesment Program (RAP) team – only six scientists – in
Cambodia to evaluate the diversity of mammals, birds, plants,
reptiles and amphibians, and ants, my specialty. However, there
was so much local interest in our work that we had 20 Khmer –
assistants – from CI-Cambodia, the Department of Forestry and
Wildlife and the military police. They actually proved to be
very good ant collectors as we documented about 100 ant species
, including some that may be new to science. I was excited to
see two ant-plant associations that I had only read about. The
first was the weaver ant, which uses the silk produced by its
larvae to sew leaves together to make i