Death by Ant Suicide

I woke up the other day and walked into the bathroom for my daily routine of peeing and teeth brushing, only to find, to my surprise, that over the night several guests had moved in. More than several, probably several hundred, and they continued to multiply as more came from the walls, from the mirror, scurrying along the floor, like rabbits, or my cousins in Kentucky, but worse. Ants, several hundreds of them, thousands of them, 462,931 of them, had decided to make their summer home in the hidden crevices of my bathroom.

It seemed the ants had taken an affinity to the fallen particles of toothpaste from my toothpaste tube, the little particles that begin to form from the leftover pinch that doesn’t quite get covered when I screw the cap back on, the particles which dry out and get all crusty and eventually don’t allow the cap to be screwed on at all. I think they were carrying those off to their secret ant colony behind the mirror and feeding them to their young. Disgustingly enough, ants eat by sucking the juice out of stuff, and then throwing the leftovers away, which means there were probably hundreds of microscopic waste particles of sodium bicarbonate or menthol or methamphetamines or whatever else is not juicy in toothpaste scattered about my bathroom sink. That required me to place the toothpaste on the shelf above the toilet out of the ant’s reach. Unfortunately, I forgot ants can climb walls, and they ate my toothpaste anyway.

Ants had overrun my sanctuary of personal hygiene, and they didn’t seem to be disappointed with their living situation. However, over the next few minutes I made sure they really hated their landlord. I smashed all the ants I could see in a piece of toilet paper, watched them swirl down the toilet, and continued my daily routine, running off to class, not giving the infestation another thought. Returning later that afternoon, I noticed all the cousins and their brothers had come to find their lost kin. But fear not, they stumbled upon the same fate, death by swirling toilet water.

I became a little concerned at this point, worried that if I went to bed I would wake up in the middle of the night to find that the deceased ants’ spouses were furious, had planned a coup, and were going to overrun me by throwing me over the balcony. Apparently, according to experts, ants can carry 50 times their own weight. And even though they weigh only about one fraction of a speck, if you multiply a fraction of a speck with about a billion ants times 50, I’m sure they could throw me over the balcony, no problem.

On the 12th of August in 2004, Michelle Poutney, a science reporter for Australia’s Herald Sun, the country’s largest newspaper, wrote an article titled “Invading Ants May Take Over.” Now, I don’t know what the article was in reference to, nor do I care; what I care about is that “invading ants” are possible and that they could “take over.” Some excerpts from her article include:

• “…ants have been found….to multiply out of control.”
• “A GIANT [sic] colony of invading ants...is...highly aggressive.”
• “…ants are…considered dangerous to humans.”
• “A co-operating group [of ants] acts in a coordinated, logical and pro-active way to achieve their communal aims.” (i.e. death by balcony overthrow)

I have the utmost of confidence in Michelle’s credibility, seeing as her title contains the word “scientific.” This means that, most likely, the ants in my bathroom will take over not only the rest of my house, but probably the whole block, if not the country. And, they will kill me. There is no way I could allow this proliferation, or allow myself to be brutally murdered by a band of homicidal, revengeful ants, so I went to Target and bought an ant trap.

The ant trap I chose was a little circle piece of plastic filled with ant death poison that one sets on the counter and (if one so desires) watches the ants, unbeknownst to them, enter and seek out their ultimate death. I felt quite the rogue, tempting them with sweet smelling bait and watching them kill themselves by their own stupidity. I picked one ant in particular that really pissed me off (because of the smug look on his face) and set the ant trap close enough to him that he could smell the toxic pleasantness, but not so close that I had personally ill fated him. What I’m trying to say is that he had a choice whether or not he wanted to die. I watched him for a good fifteen minutes. Granted I could have been doing something much more productive during those fifteen minutes, like studying for the midterm I had the next day or putting the grease fire out that had started downstairs in the kitchen, but I was so enthralled I couldn’t pull myself away.

I watched as Buddy the Ant, strolling along minding his own ant business, got a whiff of my trap. He came over to explore thinking, “hmmm…a sudden sweet-smelling addition to the already cozy ambiance of this beautiful new home, I wonder what it is? Looks like delightful goodness to me. I think I’ll go down this white tunnel, to that light at the end, that’s where the pleasantness seems to be coming from. But wait, what if it is a trap, oh well, I’m just a stupid ant, and there are 467 billion more of me in the world, it doesn’t really matter.” He slowly makes his way up to the trap, suddenly hesitates wondering if it’s too good to be true, then finally gives in and scuttles toward the delightfulness. Yes. Success. And it’s not a quick, painless death either, but a slow entrapment in the sticky goo wherein he starves to death. Buddy the Ant, it was too good to be true. I left in victory, making predictions about how many ants would meet their ultimate fate by the end of the day.

All this talk of ants reminds me of ant encounters as a child. When I was a little girl living out in the country with nothing to do but clean up horse manure and run around in the woods, probably naked, I would take my dad’s huge magnifying glass and go outside to burn things with the sun. I remember one afternoon, after burning leaves and sticks for about 37 seconds, my attention began to wane, and I sought out innocent creatures to torment. I found a worm in the grass, but it was too big and looked as if it could have a soul; I didn’t want to go to hell for frying a worm on the driveway. But next to the worm was an ant hill made of fine, sandy, Indiana soil. An evil smile crossed my face. Ants are perfect culprits because they are small and run around in capricious circles, making them a bit of a challenge, yet once that tiny beam of magnifying glass altered sunlight hits them, they spasm and seizure and shrivel up into a tiny exoskeleton speck, sometimes turning into a microscopic little flame for a split second and leaving the smallest of trails of ant-burning smoke. Sometimes, I chased them around with my light point because whenever they got close, they turned and escaped in some other random direction. I tried to get them to run into sideways Dixie cups just to see how many I could control at once. Those were the days.

Returning later that day to my ant trap, I noticed it was attracting quite the crowd. Everyone wanted to get a taste of this new fangled contraption, much like the hybrid car, but instead of getting a fuel-conserving, environment-saving mode of transportation, the ants died. I went to sleep that night less fearful of a coup d'état and more fearful the carcinogenic ant poison dust particles would waft up onto my toothbrush and cause my teeth to fall out. But you win some, you lose some.

What did I learn from the ants? Probably nothing, except that for some reason, I am obsessed with seeing them die. But maybe the ants did teach me something, in fact, sometimes I think life is a bit like my ants. They, like me, have specific goals in mind: feed their family with toothpaste, work hard, strive for success; but then something gets in the way, something bigger than us, something that has better plans for us than we have for ourselves, someone who has our best interest in mind to guide us in the right direction. (However, I certainly did not have the ant’s best interest in mind as I laughed loudly, pounding my fist into the air in victory when one of them met their fate by slowly, unknowingly, walking into my ant trap). But what I’m talking about is the good kind of intervention, the intervention of something which makes us better, stronger, and wiser in the end. This could be a person we passionately love; it could be a Zen Buddhism principle which grounds us and alters our way of thinking; or it could be God who reaches out and adjusts our paths with his little speck of light from a heavenly magnifying glass. We run away from what seems to burn us, to hurt us, and, often begrudgingly, take the path he’s planned.

But then again, maybe the ants didn’t teach me anything and this is just a lofty stretch to find the moral to the frankly moral-less story. In fact, the only real moral of the story seems to be that if you’re an ant, don’t live in my bathroom, and don’t cross me, I’ll win.