The first loud crackle tastes and feels like popcorn, but by the time the juices spray wildly in your mouth and the filament-like legs slide down your throat, there's no mistaking this toasted ant queen.
The people of sun-soaked northern Colombia have been eating ants for centuries. They believe the accurately named hormiga culona -- big-butt queen ant -- is everything from a natural form of Viagra to a protein-rich defense against cancer.
Now the invertebrates are going global: A businessman in Santander province exported more than 400kg of the 2.5cm-long queen ants last year, many of them to be hand-dipped in Belgian chocolate and sold in fancy packaging at US$8 for a half dozen at upscale London department stores like Harrods and Fortnum & Mason.
But even as the delicacy begins to expand beyond Colombia, the ants appear to be dwindling in Santander, and that worries the region's ant-eating bipeds.
This year's harvest, which usually begins around Easter and lasts as late as June, was one of the worst on record, with peasants in the artist colony of Barichara reporting half their normal year's haul.
Entomologists say the winter was unusually harsh and spring rains were late, which may have disturbed the virgin queen ants' nuptial flights -- the one time a year when they emerge from their dune-like ant hills to seek a mate and form a new colony. Almost as often, the queens are grabbed by lizards, birds or humans.
Expanding fields of beans, tomatoes and tobacco also have replaced the region's last remaining wilderness and farmers consider the leaf-cutting ants -- the species atta laevigata -- to be serious pests.
"It's an age-old dilemma for the farmer -- should I kill it or eat it?" said Andres Santamaria, who was given a US$40,000 grant from Santander's government to develop an environmentally sustainable, export-oriented program for breeding the ants.
Whatever the local conditions, overseas demand by itself won't endanger the ant supply, say those involved in the trade.
"We're never going to eat Colombians out of their ants," said Todd Dalton, a 30-year-old chef in London whose yen for the exotic dish led him to create Edible, a novelty food brand whose products are not for the squeamish.
Last year, Edible sold some 100kg of the ants, most of them dipped in chocolate, along with other specialties like lollipops with scorpions inside.
In Colombia, people generally toast the ants in salt at community gatherings and eat them as a snack. But there is innovation. Restaurants in Barichara offer an ant-based spread for bread and an ant-flavored lamb sauce.
Stuffed tortilla "atta wraps" led the menu at a recent tasting at the Montreal Insectarium, an insect museum in Canada.
"In France, they're so highly regarded people started calling them the caviar of Santander," said Stephane Le Tirant, curator at the Montreal Insectarium.
During harvest time in Santander, ants by the bagful are sold at almost every roadside stop. But although relatively abundant, they're not cheap -- costing as much as US$24 a kilogram.
The culona is a source of regional pride, its image gracing everything from the logo of a long-distance bus company to the provincial La Culona lottery. It also connects locals to the province's indigenous past, when ants were a part of a complex mating ritual of the Guane Indians.
Rising demand from the outside has helped push up prices that peasant harvesters are getting.
"A few years ago they cost half as much," said Hernando Medina, the province's main exporter.
Not everyone is cashing in. Jorge Raul Diaz maintains 37 ant colonies on a small farm outside Barichara, but in homage to native culture, he gives them away.
During last year's harvest, he organized the first culona-gathering contest, in which 22 participants competed over two months to see who could bag the most insects.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they