Posted November 30, 2012
For years we have been on a search for documentation of what in the Popol Vuh story is romanticized mythical creation (such as a faux Sun God with golden attributes) compared with animals which are are actually zoologically correctly described in the Popol Vuh.
Let's take leaf-cutting ants. Millions of leaf-cutting ants are known for all of tropical Mesoamerica. You can see these at Tikal, Seibal, El Mirador, Yaxha, Dos Pilas (all in El Peten, Guatemala), and Copan in Honduras. But the Popol Vuh clearly and specifically states that leaf-cutting ants steal flowers from the garden of the evil Xibalba deities.
So for the last four years we have gone out into the rain forests of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Guatemala, to search for the reality. Do leaf-cutting ants really harvest flowers?
The Popol Vuh even says that some ants climb high in trees to get flowers from the tree tops. And that other ants gather flowers already fallen onto the ground? But then the ants are not "cutting" the flowers if already on the ground. Yet their zoological designation is known around the world clearly as "leaf-CUTTING" ants.
Row of zompopos carrying the long tubular segments of Pachira aquatica flowers; the other ants carry leaves, but the long brown forms are parts of the zapoton flower, Photo by Nicholas Hellmuth, high-res digital camera.
We used a 21 megapixel Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III camera, 100mm macro lens, two different kinds of macro flash to record the zompopos. Recently the Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis had an exhibit of about 20 of our high-res digital photographs of these ants.
Please return later this year and we will reveal what we found during months of field work over four years.
