I had a wild night in the Amazon – and woke up to a tattered tent invaded by these terrifying visitors

The ants go to chew one by one – hurray, quickly!

Thought ants attacking your picnic was annoying? Paul Rosolie, an American conservationist and Amazon explorer, captured the moment giant ants dismantled his tent during a terrifying night in the jungle.

“One of the worst episodes ever of why you think you want my job but you definitely don’t,” the adventurer captioned the clip of the nightmarish infection, which happened while he was camping in the Peruvian Amazon. “The walls have broken and I’ve just been stuck inside a festival of many kinds of insect life.”

“It was like the battle in the depths of Helm. I haven’t slept,” added Rosolie, who often shares his Amazon exploits with his 1.1 million Instagram followers.

Accompanying footage shows the haunted naturalist trying to sleep at 2am as his tent is ransacked by leafcutter ants, a spiny species known for harvesting leaves and then composting them to grow mushrooms in underground farms mushrooms.

This time, instead of leaves, the opportunistic insects decided to extract giant chunks of material from Roselie’s residence and then distribute them with pincers.

“There are about 10 million leafcutter ants outside this tent,” complains the author. “And all they’re doing is carving leaf-sized holes out of my tent. They’re taking the nylon out into the night.”

Rosolie claimed that at one point a leafcutter bit her ear and tried to pick her up as well.

If this incursion wasn’t bad enough, the giant holes allowed larger creepy crawlies to infiltrate the settlement like an entomological siege.

“They’re making holes big enough to put my fist through, which means everything else on Amazon is coming into my tent,” the content creator said.

Other multi-legged intruders, according to the Indiana Jones-evoking clip, included mosquitoes, centipedes, and even a tarantula the size of a dinner plate, which was shown crawling up to Rosolie’s head as he looked on worriedly. .

“That’s what outdoor camping is all about,” he said. “Sometimes you put your tent in the wrong place and the leafcutter ants and jungle gods decide it’s going to be the worst night ever.”

Rosolie has spent nearly 20 years campaigning to protect threatened ecosystems around the globe. He is also the founder of Junglekeepers, an organization dedicated to conserving the Peruvian Amazon amid threats from gold mining, logging and poaching.

The wildlife warrior notably chronicled his Amazonian adventures in the book Mother Of God and has appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience and the Lex Fridman podcast.

In a 2014 episode of Discovery Channel’s Eaten Alive, Rosolie agreed to be eaten by an anaconda.

“I came inches away, moments away from exploding my ribcage,” said the daredevil, who wore a special protective suit for the stunt.

He eventually called it quits after the snake started eating away at his head.