MAY 4, 2021 – Yesterday on my hike inside “Little Switzerland,” I cut a beeline off the bend of a border street, down a steep slope, and across the eighth tee. Recent rains had brought out “a bunch of ants”—my pre-ant education terminology—as revealed by multiple, unmistakable “ant foxholes” dotting the tee—as it were. As I, a gigantic human, marched across the tee, I made sure that I stomped on one of those fox holes—partly because I could; mostly because I knew it would feel good to land the arch of my left foot exactly onto the “foxhole”—the perfect circle of soil, processed into fine particles of dirt, by now nicely sun-dried, with a hole in the center.
The deed not only gave my arch a good feeling. The work of crushing destruction gave me a hint of a sliver of a scintilla of sheer . . . power. Among people, I’m just another slug; among ants—I’m big and almighty! You, ants, you’re just . . . “a bunch of ants.”
Having flattened ant works with barely a thought, I gave slightly more thought to a book I’d read about Britain at the time of the Norman Conquest. Just before William’s invasion, a rowdy band of Vikings hit the east coast of England, about halfway up its back. They landed outside a town and climbed the heights behind it. After considerable effort, the invaders lined up a few dozen very large balls of pine pitch, lit them afire, and rolled them down the slope smack dash into the town, which, as planned, went up in flames. The author then wrote, “[The Vikings] did this mostly for the fun of it.”
By the time I was striding down the fairway, I felt remorse for my dastardly deed. Like those Vikings and their fiery, pine pitch balls, I’d decimated the hard work of ants “mostly for the fun of it.” To atone for my crime against nature I sentenced myself to what turned out to be an hour of “ant education camp.”
I’m now in awe of these amazing creatures. For starters, I ran the numbers.
Myrmecologists—you guessed it: people who study ants—estimate the number of ant species at 22,000 and the total number of ants at roughly one million per human being. In combined weight ants constitute 15% to 25% of the earth’s biomass. An individual ant can forage over 700 feet from its nest. To put that into human perspective—imagine yourself walking 38 miles daily to your closest supermarket. As to longevity, an ant colony queen can live up to 30 years.
What’s most amazing about ants, however, is their super-sophisticated means of transmitting information and organizing their societies to optimize success. They are studied in a host of disciplines, from biometrics to sociology to computer science. Ants are extraordinarily adaptive, and due to their concept of “community,” they’ll likely own the planet long after we’ve done ourselves in.
When it comes to “Don’t Tread on Me!” ants will have the last laugh.
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
