Some (perhaps most; perhaps all) people are better and calmer than I am, and one of the manifestations of this superiority is to be able to stand back and partake in the wonder of ants: the choreographed movements, the relentless invasions, the thoughtless obedience to the collective. I am too small for that. I did not like my earlier experience with ants in the house. Here's more about ants and me, this time with literary affect:
It's early summer in Austin. The mercury in the thermometer reaches for the sky, where a fiery sun awaits the earth's annual kow tow, a bend at the equatorial hip that allows more of the energy generated in the thermonuclear furnace at the heart of solar system to reach, and stay, in the northernmost half of the big blue marble we call home. In response to this radiant abundance, an entomophobic man with insomniac tendencies contemplates his choices. Attempt to sleep with the heat and humidity, or flick a switch that will send sweet, cool air throughout his apartment, greatly increasing his comfort and his chances of sleep. Given to weakness, the man reaches for the switch. Then it happens:
Nothing. A fan stirs to life, but it's rotations are as impotent as the Mike Ditka without his little pill -- the fan merely circulates the same warm, damp air that initiated the man's attempt at electro-mechanico-chemical transformation of his micro-climate. For what followed, the reader will require little guidance from this writer, such is the quality of previous writers' invocations of nights in such conditions: fevered dreams on a damp pillow; time passing slowly; fans and ice water; bad memories of cheap Hong Kong hostels.
Having reported this failure to my apartment manager the next morning, I was filled with expectations of a quick fix. I returned home from work, however, and the apartment remained haunted by air so thick one could swear that gravity had gone perpendicular; progress across the floor seemed as labored as a climb up the stairs. But then appeared my knight on his white horse; the a/c technician in his white panel van. After a brief hello, it was up to the roof with him, and then, just ten minutes later, a return from on high. Success, he announced. So what had happened?
Ants. So very many ants that their little dead bodies had blocked the switch on my rooftop a/c unit. And then my knight told me a story: the electrical current in the a/c unit apparently gets the ants "high." Unable to control themselves, they continue to seek out the current, even as they climb over the growing mountain of fallen comrades. The stoned ants eventually meet a charge so pure it paralyzes them, their ecstasy preventing them from moving away from the current; their nervous systems, overloaded, shut down and back to karmic wheel they go, leaving a physical manifestation that contributes to the accretion of bodies that will eventually prevent the a/c from working.
Perhaps I am over-emphasizing the ants. Surely, you ask, around the same time, didn't a two-inch roach share your pillow in the night? Why the focus on ants when that roach ruined a good nights sleep more directly than the poor, addicted ants?
Call me a Leninist, but in my little red book collective power remains greater than individual bravery. Yes, the roach that shared my pillow was audacious, and anything that can live in sewer lines is a formidable adversary. And while roaches will outlive humans, I do not see them directly overthrowing us. But the ants - the ants may not just outlast us, but actively destroy us. For instance, by forming super-colonies of acid-flinging crazy ants.
A myth? A result of the fevered dreams on a damp pillow? No, dear readers: the truth. Consider Christmas Island. According to this story from the Austrailian, the ants spray formic acid to blind and paralyze native crabs, leaving them to dehydrate and starve to death. It's threatening the crab's survival, and the fantastic spectacle of 50 millions crabs' annual migration from the rain forest to the shore. Organized adversaries, capable of using chemical warfare to undermine their adversaries? What is to be done?
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