Caught on camera: My night of hell when leaf-cutter ants stole my TENT… while I was in it (and a tarantula turned up, too)

‘It was hell. I’ve never seen anything like it. That night was insanity. It was just a nightmare.’

Paul Rosolie is telling MailOnline Travel about the night in the Peruvian Amazon that leaf-cutter ants stole his tent – while he was in it – cutting up the nylon fabric with their pincers and carrying the pieces off into the night.

The intrepid American explorer, conservationist and author captured the moment on camera, posting the footage to his Instagram account with a caption that read: ‘Yet another reason you think you want my job. The walls have been breached and I was just stuck inside a multi-species festival of insect life.’

Multi-species?

Paul reveals that termites, moths, mosquitoes, a millipede and ‘insects I can’t even identify’ came in through the ‘fist-sized holes’ created by the ants. The footage ends with Paul staring at a tarantula that also made its way inside.

Paul, in a Zoom chat with MailOnline, continues: ‘Beforehand, everything was great. We were on a sandy beach by the side of a stream. Everything was in the clear. We caught a fish, we cooked it in bamboo, and then we went to sleep. And then, right around midnight, disaster.

‘It was the first night that I used that very expensive, super-lightweight tent. It had to be thrown out. I took it to a sewing lady at the market, and she said, “There’s no way to rescue this.”‘

Did Paul try to evict the intruders?

‘Nothing worked,’ he says. ‘I tried bug spray and walked a circle of gasoline around the tent and then lit it to try and protect it. The ants didn’t care. I think that encouraged them.’

Paul’s leaf-cutter experience highlights just how disquieting jungle exploration can be – even for seasoned explorers like him.

How do first-timers get on in the jungle – any common errors?

Paul says: ‘Where to even begin! Going into the deep Amazon is like going to Antarctica or going to Everest. It’s super intense.

‘I’ve seen people fall into mud up to their neck and almost not be able to get out. I’ve seen people take their first machete swing and hit a hive full of wasps and get covered in stings and have to be medevacked and taken to a hospital.

‘And the things that will get you? Snakes, jaguars, anacondas? No. A lot of the things that will really get you are things like the bullet ants.

‘You reach down to pick up a piece of a flower, and there’s a bullet ant that stings you on the hand, and then for the next two days you have a fever and a headache, and your glands are all swollen, and you have this throbbing pain coursing through your entire body, and you feel like you’ve been shot.’

Does Paul manage to enjoy jungles?

He says, laughing: ‘It’s my favourite place in the world. I love them. There’s so much beautiful life. But you need to know the rules of this very alternate reality.

‘For example, there are some trees that have spikes that are as long as your forearm. So if you were to go running blindly through the forest because you got stung in the ass by a bullet ant, you could impale yourself on a tree so badly that you die.

‘One of the worst mistakes is not realising that you have to stay clean in the jungle. You have to wash your clothes. You can’t just sweat all day and then leave your clothes out and then put them back on.’

Why?

‘Bot flies,’ says Paul.

Bot flies can lay eggs on sweaty clothing, with mosquitoes also depositing them, and the larvae can get under your skin and ‘grow bigger than an almond’.

Paul adds: ‘They’ll eat you while they’re in your skin. And you can’t just pull them out. Some people have surgery to get them out.’

Despite all the perils and, as Gen Z would put it, the ‘ick’, Paul has dedicated his life to saving the Amazon from destruction, partly through his ‘Junglekeepers’ organisation, which is helping to conserve threatened habitat in the ‘vitally important’ Madre de Dios region of the Peruvian Amazon – ‘one of the most biodiverse and pristine areas on earth’.

Paul describes the Amazon as ‘the most important terrestrial biological diversity on our planet’.

He explains: ‘It creates climate stability, it holds undiscovered medicines, indigenous communities, endangered species. It’s one of the most crucial gifts that we have on Earth. If we lost the Amazon, it would have catastrophic post-apocalyptic global consequences immediately.’

One way that Junglekeepers fights deforestation is by persuading loggers to change careers – and become rangers, instead.

Paul explains: ‘We interview the loggers, and we say, “Hey, could you stop cutting down the jungle? And we’ll pay you to be rangers.”

‘And they’re happy to make the switch. Most of those loggers are really nice local people with families who just need a job, and that’s why they’re logging.

‘And then what happens is they see conservation as something that led to a better life for them, and so it becomes part of their culture to protect at all costs the Amazon rainforest – the biological crown jewel of the earth.’

For more from Paul visit him on Instagram at www.instagram.com/paulrosolie on Twitter (‘X’) at x.com/paulrosolie and on YouTube here – www.youtube.com/@junglekeeper. For more on Junglekeepers visit www.junglekeepers.org.

Paul has released an audiobook about his Amazon adventures – Mother of God: An Extraordinary Journey into the Uncharted Tributaries of the Western Amazon.