Leap in Exultation … .. .. .. and flying ants !!

Leap in Exultation   … .. .. .. and flying !!  (subject matter of this post)

 

A century in Cricket  - when I started watching Cricket in mid 1970s, Sunil Gavaskar would grind the bowlers and make one with exquisite straight drives; after almost a decade of initiation into ODI, came the first century in ODI, that epic 175 against Zimbabwe. 

Then came one by Krish Srikkanth, Mohinder Amarnath, Ravi Shastri … .. centuries were rare but now Virat Kohli has 50; Sachin Tendulkar 49; Rohit Sharma 31; Sourav Ganguly 22;  Shikhar Dhawan 17; Virender Sehwag 15; Yuvraj Singh 14; Rahul Dravid 12 & Gautam Gambhir 11 (the ones above 10) 

A century in a 120 ball game obviously is much much tougher.  That list too has a dozen,  Suresh Raina made in Gros Iselt way back in May 2010; then it was Rohit Sharma, KL Rahul, Rohit Sharma, KL Rahul, Rohit Sharma, Rohit Sharma, Deepak Hooda, Suryakumar Yadav,  Virat Kohli, Suryakumar Yadav, Suryakumar Yadav, Shubman Gill, Yashaswi Jaiswal, Ruturaj Gaikwad, Suryakumar Yadav, Rohit Sharma, Abhishek Sharma, Sanju Samson, Sanju Samson,   & .. ..   Tilak Varma. 

The tall - Namboori Thakur Tilak Varma, resembles Telugu hero, and at 22 years of age has become India’s second youngest centurion – first being Yashasvi Jaiswal – made a ton in just 51 balls.  He shared  a 107-run second-wicket stand with Abhishek Sharma, and a 58-run fifth-wicket partnership with Rinku Singh, in which Tilak contributed 45.  At Centurion, sixers were flying from the bats of Tilak Varma and Abhishek Sharma.  As Sanju fell for a nought, Tilak walked in and took the attack to South Africa posting a huge total. Tilak, though, paced his innings superbly and ensured that India got up to 219.    

In T20 Cricket, no total is good enough and the chase was on in right earnest.  Arshdeep bowled the first over and the second was to be bowled by Hardik Pandya but Umpires stopped the game for a strange reason – ‘flying ants’ !!! 

"Flying ants”  (eesal)  are commonly seen after rain because they are looking for mates and places to start new colonies. This phase is called nuptial flight, and it's when virgin queens take flight to mate with males. Flying ants are most likely to appear after rain, when the weather is warm, humid, and windy.  They are called - Patingas or Parwana or Eeyal or Eesal  

 

By description they are ants with wings !!   what we often see are female black garden ants, marching around collecting food. But during summer, winged males and new queens of the same species take flight!  The ants take to the skies so that queens can mate with males from different colonies, and set up new nests of their own.  For a swarm of ants to occur, conditions must be just right – they’re usually triggered by hot and humid weather in July or August. The reason the ants appear in such big numbers is that it helps protects them from predators. Flying all together all at once also gives them a much better chance of finding mates. 

In 2018, flying ants invaded the court at Wimbledon, distracting tennis players and making news headlines around the world!  The bigger ones are the queens – they’re up to 15mm in length. After mating, queens chew off their wings and crawl around looking for a place to dig a new nest.  Nuptial flight is an important phase in the reproduction of most ant, termite, and some bee species. A mature ant colony seasonally produces winged virgin queens and males, called alates. Unfertilized eggs develop into males. Fertilized eggs usually develop into wingless, sterile workers, but may develop into virgin queens if the larvae receive special attention. Typically the virgin queens and males first scatter to ensure outcrossing.  Queens often try to escape the males, allowing only the fastest and the fittest males to mate.  The males have evolved for the single purpose of inseminating the queen and dies.     

It was flying ants that stopped play at Centurion for a while.  It is not the first time ! - a South Africa v Sri Lanka fixture, bees decided to make an appearance. With Sri Lanka tottering at 194 for 8 in a must-win game against a charged South African attack, there was calm, laughter, and a bit of a lie down for 9 and 10, Isuru Udana and Suranga Lakmal in the 48th over. The delay only lasted a few minutes though, the polite Durham bees seeing themselves off unlike the ones in Johannesburg in 2017, that had demanded expert intervention.

 

Interesting !
 
Regards – S Sampathkumar
14.11.2024