Ant Life

Ants are bigots. They’re racists; they’re sexists; they’re foodists; and they’re one of the most destructive species on the planet. Other than that, they’re good folks — hard working, socially collaborative, and exceedingly health-conscious. They’ve also been around at least as long as we have, so let’s venture a closer inspection of them.

I’ll call the celebrity of our expose Camilla. She’s a pure-bred member of the Pogonomyrmex Barbatus Clan — a Brown Harvester Ant. Camilla works her (whatever she has in place of an ass) off every day. She starts work before sunrise and works until well after dinner time. She spends her days harvesting seeds and other organic material to feed the ant colony.

Camilla is fiercely loyal to her colony. Along with other members of her sisterhood, she hits the trail seven days a week and never ever takes a vacation. This could explain why she only lives two-to-six months. Almost all of what she harvests is not for her personal use, but rather for feeding of the up-and-coming generation within her colony.

In contrast, Barbie, the queen of Camilla’s tribe never lifts a finger. She just hangs around the throne room all day, eating whatever is set before her and fornicating with every male ant that gets within her reach. She also lives thirty years (there might be a lesson there).

Camilla and her sisters do all the work, carrying as much as twenty-five times their body weight back to the colony from locations up to a half-mile away. That may not seem so far to you and I but consider the difference in scale. Our normal stride is roughly three feet. Camilla’s entire body is only 10 millimeters long, and she doesn’t have any shoes.

Speaking of bodies, Camilla and the girls are buff — I mean the kind of buff that would put Ms. Olympia, Andrea Shaw, to shame. These ladies spend roughly eighteen hours a day getting the equivalent of a full-on, non-stop gym workout. That helps explain how they stay so slim even after eating half their body weight in food every day. Imagine if you and I ate half our weight in food every day. Within a week, Walmart would look like a post-apocalyptic movie prop. Forget carbon footprints; we’d eat the planet dry.

Like with people, food is a thing to ants. Part of the contempt Camilla’s tribe holds for Black Ants is their diet. Black ants are carnivores whereas Camilla’s “more refined” tribe is vegan. They look down on those black ants for viciously killing harmless birds and mice and devouring dead flesh. But let some poor hapless Black Ant wander into Camilla’s territory in search of a Whataburger and there will be blood.

Besides food and skin-color issues, ants even have issues with fellow members of their sub-species who look and eat like them. In particular, Fire Ants are detested. Red Ants’ antipathy towards Fire Ants is due to their smaller relatives’ pugnacious attitude. Fire Ants are roughly half the size of Red Ants and carry a chip on their shoulder (not a food chip). They run in gangs and kill anything that they encounter, including frail humans. But Fire Ants likely believe their actions are justified since they’ve been mistreated throughout history due to their stunted stature.

I mentioned that ants are racist and food bigots and lack concern for the eco-system but I also mentioned that they’re sexist. You probably indulged in some confirmation bias and labeled the male ants as the sexists since they get to do the deed with the queen all day while the females do all the work. Actually, just the opposite is true. That queen wears those drones out so thoroughly that they die within twenty-four hours. Male ants are kept around for nothing but their man-juice and are discarded like yesterday’s socks after queenie has her way with them. What a way to go ! (Yeah, I said it but all you dirty-minded men were thinking it.)

That begs the question as to what all those other female ants are doing for sex. Are they celibate? Are they homo-sexual? Are they just too pumped on steroids to even think about sex? Well, it turns out that they don’t share the human obsession with recreational sex. Also, after spending three fourths of their day at the gym, they’re just too tired for anything but a couple hours spent playing on their iPhones and then, off to sleep.

So, if ants aren’t nearly as heroic as we’ve always assumed they were, why do we glorify them? Are their work ethic and commitment to the colony really worth deifying in light of their baser instincts? Perhaps the better question is, “Can bad species (and people) do good things — things worth emulating?” I would contend that in the same way some of the best people I’ve ever known are capable of thinking, saying, and doing evil, maybe the people we view as bad might be capable of intermittent good.

Perhaps it’s time we spent at least as much effort emulating the good stuff people do as we spend condemning their failures.

But I’m still gonna pour Amdro on every Fire Ant mound I encounter.

A meeting of great minds who think alike