I had another strange encounter with an anthill. This one was at the
in the field outside of my house.
winter When observing an ant colony, I first orient myself by looking at the size and colors of the ants. The colony that seems to live at this particular megalopolis is made up of pretty large ants (as far as ants go), black in the back, and reddish in the front.
Color me surprised when I saw some smallish black ants scurrying around the megalopolis, and color me even more surprised when I saw one of the red ants seemingly in some kind of quarrel with one of the black ants. They were really going at it, so it seemed. I don’t know how to describe it in a more defamiliarized way. My western mind could only see the encounter as a fight. Heads colliding, bodies moving around as a unit in erratic circles.
Somewhere along the way, I lost track of the two fighting ants and got caught up looking at the actual hill around which the ants seem to gravitate. It’s a rather large hill with a sort of cliff’s edge at the top of it, under which the ants crawl to get into the hole. It seems like the hill hole bifurcates into two sub-holes that go down to god only knows where. It’s in moments like that when I wish I could shrink down to the size of an ant—or maybe a little bigger, so I don’t get caught up in (what a human might view as) a fight.
Anyway, I digress. But one further point I’ll make in that digression is that when I crouch for a minute, or even just a few seconds, my legs protest and tell me to stand up. Something about the blood flow? Compressing nerves? Something in my legs doesn’t like me being crouched, and it’s a real shame, because I want to be able to watch these events for as long as I please. But I suppose there’s something about the scarcity of observations that makes each observation feel all the more monumental. Also, vision plays a role in the discomfort. With my glasses on, my eyes have to strain to look down. But then, do I set my glasses on the ground? Do I take them off and put them somewhere else? No pockets on my shorts today. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because it’s not as much of a limiting factor as the legs. Not to mention my spine, which is not really interested in being as kyphotic as it needs to be to bend over the anthill and observe. Observing ants is not only a problem of legs, but of eyes and spines.
My eyes eventually stumbled back upon the two (presumably) fighting ants. This time, I saw the black ant climbing up a blade of grass, as if to escape the jabs of the red ant. I had never seen this kind of
before, but it was pretty cool and elegant. The ants must be pretty smart if they can employ tactics like that.
The black ant eventually descended from the blade of grass and grabbed one of the red ant’s six legs. It dragged the ant far away from the megalopolis. This was particularly disturbing to me, as I had assumed that the anthill belonged to the red ants.
This is when I started to question the frame that I had brought to my observations. I realized quite quickly that it was an overly dualistic one. Who am I to think my own feeble english language could describe the events that happen near anthills? Who’s to say that the anthill belongs to any one color of ant?
Who’s to say, even, that the black ants and the red ants are different in any way that is meaningful to the ants themselves? Their differences in color didn’t seem to be much of a problem for the more (apparently) peaceful ants. I may have expected the red ants to team up and assist in the fight, to tip the balance toward the red ant, but it seemed like they were entirely unconcerned with the entanglement, even when the action was taking place right on top of the anthill itself, in the epicenter of the ant megalopolis.
After the black ant had dragged the red ant pretty far out, the red ant escaped its grasp and darted back to the anthill. When it got back across the event horizon of the megalopolis, it scurried around in all directions, with seemingly no intention. It seemed like it was freaking out. When I looked back over to the black ant, the dragger, I saw it perched at the top of a blade of grass, as if lying in wait.
This was, again, an observation that was limited by my own legs’ ability to keep me in a position close to the ground. I was only able to sit there for about a minute—maybe two minutes—but then, time spent observing ants is dilated in ways that I can’t quite understand.
In conclusion, I really have no idea what is going on in the antworld, in large part because I’m not the size of an ant, and because I don’t have the same nervous system as the ants, and not the same culture.
In time, I hope I will find some method of observing that doesn’t disrupt the ants’ lives. I want to be an observer who causes as little destruction as possible, and what I’m quickly realizing is that the act of observation might necessarily be a destructive one.
later