The March of the Ants

The March of the Ants

When I was a kid I used to like ants. To be fair, I had lived in Venezuela for four years and then two years in Costa Rica. I think I may have mentioned the little tropical valley there several thousand times. What I may not have explained is that the thing that makes the tropics the tropics is that the daily weather works something like this; it starts off sunny, hot and humid in the morning, it gets gradually more sunny, hot and humid as the day goes on, and then at about two in the afternoon the humidity goes up to 100% and clouds form from nowhere and unleash a torrent of rain for about twenty minutes, and then the skies suddenly clear as though nothing happened and the day goes on with a sunny, cloudless afternoon with modest humidity and waning sun into the evening. The next day it all happens all over again and every day thereafter the same. My mother used to say it only rains each day to wash the streets off, but I had a very different theory.

The best part of each day is when the rain stopped. Yes, the streets were decidedly cleaner, but it was the sudden burst of activity that always intrigued me. While the plants were wallowing in their newfound sodden wealth, the world at ground level came alive. It was the ants. Ants in the tropics are amazing. They are called leafcutters as a generic name because you can see them marching in a long winding line along a fallen tree or some such spot with each carrying a piece of leaf that is at least five times their own body size. This social collectivism always intrigued me as a child. I could sit and watch the leafcutters do their thing for hours. I liked the thought that everyone knew their job and did it for the greater good. It’s true that individualism was lost on these leafcutters ants, but that somehow seemed less important as I was mesmerized by their diligence and organization. It was somehow the way the world was supposed to work in my young and simplistic mind.

Years later I was in the Amazon on “business” and remember seeing the leafcutters in the jungle around Manaus. It immediately transported me back to my youth and my idealistic sense of how the world should work. And then that same year (I think it was 1988), I found myself in West Africa, again for business. We were meeting with the African Development Bank in Abidjan, Cote’ Ivoire. Cote’ Ivoire is what we call the Ivory Coast and it was, at the time one of the more “civilized” countries in West Africa. At the time, the country was still being run by the controversial Felix Houphouet-Boigny. He had brought prosperity to a land that had little of it. He did it by moderation and staying close to his colonial forefathers in France. He built the largest church in the world, breaking the standard set by the Vatican to have no churches larger than St. Peter’s Basilica. He lured the ADB to base itself in his country from whence the development dollars for the region needed to flow. Along the way, there were nice hotels and a place called the Ivoire Country Club, and all of them served food flown in daily from Paris. It was a strange place to visit. We were invited to play golf at the Country Club. Just the other side of the fence were young boys who used sticks and old sliced or hooked balls to show us that even with their crude weapons, they could outplay any of us. We were impressed and it did the trick to get us to buy golf balls from them. As soon as we went more into the jungle on one hole I saw a huge fifteen foot mound next to a large tropical tree. I had never seen such a large ant hill, but there they were, my old friends the leafcutters, marching along to their giant condo ant hill.

That was when I learned that leafcutters ants are, next to human beings, the animals with the most complex society on Earth. Their mounds can span as large as 6,000 square feet and ninety feet deep/high with as many as eight million ants. That makes their biggest cities as big as New York City. And here’s the thing, they organize themselves into castes. I just listened to a book by Isabel Wilkerson that was selected by Oprah’s Book Club. It was called Caste and it was about how humans are sociologically organized by castes and that what we think of as racism is really the caste system that humans can’t seem to shed no matter how evolved they become.

In the ant world the castes are determined by ant size. The four primary castes are minims, minors, mediae and majors with growing size. While the minims are tending to the ant broods, the mediae are the guys I have always loved watching, marching in columns with leaf pieces on their backs. The minors are the column guards, kicking ass of anyone or anything that seeks to disrupt the column. Those are the classic ants in your pants gang that you don’t want to mess with. Meanwhile, the majors are like the Generals, they stay back near the nest to protect it and direct the efforts of all the minims, minors, and mediae. It is all very organized and everybody knows their place and their job. From my experience there are several cultures out there that must be direct descendants of ants since they adhere to this regimented way.

I am a bit ambivalent about this fascination with ants that I seem to have. I like the idea of individualism because I am, after all, very American and what is America if not the land of the free? But obviously I am also drawn to collectivism because it seems so effective and so productive. After listening to Wilkinson’s fascinating explanations of the caste system that we all live under (whether we realize it or not), it is harder for me to like ants and their affinity with their own innate caste system. But they are ants and just because I can admire ants for their organized collective approach to life, it doesn’t mean that its the right thing for humans.

Several years ago we were visiting Cabo San Lucas and I found in a gift shop, a little set of copper wire ants marching in a ragged line with little pieces of leaf on their backs. It resonated immediately with me and those copper leafcutters ants sit on the shelf in my study in a constant march of orderly ant soldiers. As I settle in here in Escondido, one of the things we have had to deal with are the insects. The good news is that flying insects are few and far between, as I have discussed. They are not totally absent, but light by any household standard. But the ant world makes up for it. Luckily, these are small non-leafcutters ants, but ants are never a good thing. So Kim has an exterminator, Andy, who has probably breathed in too much anti-ant juice, but he is content to walk around quarterly spraying any and every place ants are likely to congregate for their assault on the house. He showed me that they had already discovered that by climbing up the new Shadesail pole up in the rocks, they can march across the length of the giant cayenne-colored Shadesail right up onto the house. Tricky devils these little ants. I think I am growing up because I am beginning to feel that I prefer the march of the ants across my study shelf….in copper. I also want to rethink this whole collective versus individualistic thing and the need for castes to keep things orderly.