writing is biological. it reflects the current state of your biology—or, at least, the parts of your brain that handle language.

the best way writing is also self-corrective. it can somewhat autonomously move itself toward certain subjects and away from others.

self-correction is itself biological. there are proteins that edit and repair broken dna; proteins that correct other proteins; thought processes that correct other thought processes. it’s all in the service of living a somehow more alive life.

stream of commerce that’s what this is all in service of, right? to live a more alive life. that’s why people are in the sky right now, in that airplane, over my head: to go from someplace they lived life to some other place where there is more life to be lived.

people are always on the go, aren’t we? maybe we are going too far sometimes. maybe we don’t need to be so well-connected.

but maybe that’s just the kind of creature we are. eusocial to an extreme.

a long trail ants travel, but they always have a trail, a literal, physical trail of ants, to follow. when it comes to us, there are definitely pheromone trails, but they can span much longer distances. for us, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we need to stay in our immediate colony, or within a rigid trail of other humans. i could get in an airplane right now and travel anywhere within the colonized world.

but i suppose i’m not so unlike ants. i have no shot of getting anywhere without following a literal, physical trail of other humans.

the ants remind me that humans follow pheromone trails of our own, but they are convoluted, and they involve aircrafts, and not just anyone can be a pilot, and not just anyone can engineer the right kind of plane for the job.

our pheromone trails are treacherous. ants, they only go where they can walk. unless the ants have figured out how to travel large distances.

automobiles come to think of it, they have. ants can hop on our planes, trains, and automobiles and smuggle themselves into regions where they are not native. they can form supercolonies. these supercolonies tend to be highly invasive, competing for resources with native populations, homogenizing things, creating a sort of monopoly that undermines local biodiversity. sound familiar?

ant supercolonies are not different from human ones. the human ones may just be harder to tease out as being so, owing to the relentless familiarity of the colonial situation. but there is certainly a eurasiamerican supercolony, through which we can travel freely via tourism.

it is our supercolonization which has allowed ants to form supercolonies. we did it first. myrmecologists posit that ants are able to supercolonize and become highly invasive by following us on our travels. how else could they have crossed oceans?

africa seems to be firmly situated outside of the eurasiamerican supercolony, but africa must have supercolonies of its own. humans being as complex as ants, and ants forming supercolonies within and between (almost) every continent, it follows that there are human supercolonies on every continent, both intra- and inter-continental.

being a resident of the north american supercolony, i can go to mexico and canada without much trouble. there would be some parts of each—likely the more rural parts—in which i would not be welcomed, but still, there’s a sort of north american sensibility, a certain epigenetics, that we all share, that allows us to travel freely without experiencing aggression from people outside of our immediate colony.

we’re all people of the world, and borders are fake, but the question is whether we ought to stay in one place or travel freely within supercolonies. i'm inclined to think that just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

less than one percent of all ant species are known to engage in supercolonialism, and most of that one percent is considered to be invasive (destabilizing to local ecosystems). i think a greater percentage of humans are supercolonizers, and most of us should be considered invasive species.

the argument against supercolonies in ants is something like “the bigger they are, the harder they fall,” and it’s impossible to maintain a cohesive supercolony once it gets past a certain critical mass. why shouldn’t a similar argument be made against human supercolonization? i think the argument makes itself, and it is evident in the current state of our planet’s wellbeing.

as humans, i think part of being stewards for our environment is modeling good behavior for other species. in this case, the good behavior would be traveling less—much less. the ants are literally following our lead. it wouldn’t be possible for them to go supercolonial if we were not doing the same thing. they are coming with us in our backpacks.

bigger i’m glad there are people getting so granular with this research, and in this case i will make a shoutout to Hsiao-Yang Chu, Yi-Ting Fang, Tzong-Han Lin, Joanne Tzu-Chia Chen, and Shu-Ping Tseng, because these folks are doing some real, serious molecular biology on ants themselves.... but we also need to think bigger. we can use ants as a way of understanding the colonial situation in our world, and i think the colonial situation is one of the most important things to address—maybe the most important thing.

what i can say right now, for certain, is that someone is being helicoptered into this city from somewhere further north.

the anthill is an ongoing assignment for this school of life that i willfully attend.