Ant Hole

A sad and heroic story about an ant

There was once a great big anthill, ants scurrying around and carrying food for the queen and her children. This particular anthill, located in the jungles of the Amazon, is quite large (as anthills in the Amazon tend to be), about three to four feet tall, and two to three feet in diameter.

We will focus on the life of one of these particular ants in this particular anthill. Hordes of black scaly legs crawl over each other, and a couple of those legs are his. It’s really a fairly difficult place to walk, perhaps not very efficient in terms of traffic. Bumping into someone’s legs, causing them to trip; slipping, and tumbling down the anthill; in some cases, accidentally stepping on a fellow ant’s head and killing them, causing them to curl up in a ball and roll down the hill.

But the ant does not mind this ruckus. What matters to the ant is that he finds food. Food is the commodity that matters most, food for the queen, for the proliferation of the colony. First, however, he must pass this first test of traffic; can he even make it down out of the anthill?

Of course he can! He’s an ant, he’s done this for his whole life.

He walks along quickly, climbing over pine needles, summiting the peaks of logs, avoiding the occasional predatory beetle. It seems like he’s gone miles and still, he’s found no food. Sure, he’s only traveled around a hundred feet; but a hundred feet is a long distance for an ant.

Finally, he stumbles upon a dead bird. One of its wings are broken, and its eyes are white and glazed over. The wonderful stench of rotting meat proceeds from its gruesomely deformed body. At last, the ant has found a meal for the queen. Into the bird he goes.

Entering the innards of the bird through the opening left by the torn off wing, the ant begins exploring. Here he finds a myriad of different cuts to choose from. What will he choose? A molding liver? A heart dripping with blackened blood? A muscle dried out from exposure to the elements? The ant decides to go for the shriveled brain. He gets the first pickings, so obviously he’ll go for the best cut.

With his razor-sharp mandibles, the ant begins cutting a portion of the brain off to bring back to the anthill. It takes a couple minutes, but before long, he’s dragging a piece of brain six times his size out of the body of the bird. Picking it up with his mandibles and maneuvering it in such a way that he can carry it the entire hundred foot walk home, he begins his journey back. A couple times, he stumbles over pine needles and leaves, almost dropping the chunk of meat when climbing the log peak; but nevertheless, through trial and tribulation, stumbling and tripping, the ant makes it back to the hill.

Now he just has to hike the anthill to drop the brain meat into the food holding place. That, of course, is a little bit of trouble; but the ant has done this his whole life. No big deal. He made it to the food cellar, put the brain into the meat section, and went out to grab some more, bringing along with him this time a couple of ant friends.

Unfortunately, when the ants were about halfway to their destination, a feathered beast swooped down and attacked them, consuming for her lunch the entire troop of ants, including the ant we just described.

Although the ant died, his act of finding the dead bird had saved the whole colony from extinction. There was very little other food to be found in the forest at that time of year, and it was predicted that the colony would have lasted little more than a week had he not discovered the bird. Thousands of ants from the hill made the journey over the next couple weeks, during which the bird was stripped to the bones, and the colony’s cellars filled to the brim.

What can we learn from the ants?