On Thursday I spent a total of two hours watching ants.

Yesterday I noticed on my way out of the house that we had ants in the kitchen. Someone had dropped a nut on the floor (I believe it was a walnut, sans shell) and a whole colony of ants had claimed it. It was about three feet from their entrance into the kitchen (somewhere under the radiator), so they had a whole line going from the nut to their hole and back, and ants covering the nut breaking bits off for others to carry. I decided to do the responsible thing and leave for a few hours without telling anyone about it.

There’s a CVS conveniently about a hundred feet from my house (ok, Google Maps says 322 ft), so when I got back from doing work I resented, I went there to buy a 2 liter of cola (almost finished… it’ll be my third in five days) and some ant traps. At my house in Illinois we had/have an ant problem, and we bought these cool little huts of poison that the ants are attracted to. Not only do the worker ants eat the poison, they bring it back to their lair to share the treats with the rest of the colony and the queen. While it’s more satisfying spraying the ants and watching them writhe and die in shriveled ant fetal position, this method is much less messy, smelly, and time consuming.

I placed all four in good places near their nest. Then I sat on a milk crate and watched them. They were very enthusiastic about that nut, and weren’t bothered to find another source of food just yet. So I stuck a hut in their path to the nut, and they took the bait. The ants diverted half their resources to collecting yummy poison.

As I sat and watched them, I finally saw in action what I had read in Gödel, Escher, Bach so long ago: individually, ants don’t seem too intelligent, but the colony as a whole is pretty bright. With all of these little robotic things communicating with each other, stupid, apparent randomness turns into a smart collective whole. The colony, not the individual, is a conscious being. It’s communism perfected.

I sat there for an hour, watching how they moved and interacted. Then I watched the Daily Show. Then I went back to the ants for another hour. The ants that got too far off course (and too close to my feet) I killed with a fork. The ants actually sent out search parties to find and dispose of the dead ants. Or maybe that’s giving them too much credit…

Anyhow, I have a newfound respect for ants and ant colonies. But I’ll still blindly kill them when they’re in my house. Because honestly, ants, it’s my house, gtfo. Tell your friends. Today the nut and ants were gone.

P.S.: I got the new image thing working… click on a thumbnail to see the full-size image