The invasion

April 29, 2010

Dear Leslie,

Ants were villains In one of the scariest movies of my childhood. They were not spoil-the-picnic ants. They were not huge mutants created by atomic-bomb tests either. These were just regular ants in numbers so huge -- billions, trillions, quadrillions, quintillions, sextillions, septillions, octillions -- that they instantaneously stripped the vegetation and flesh off everything they crawled over.

The movie was called "The Naked Jungle." It was Man versus Nature. Charlton Heston played Man, a South American plantation owner who refuses to scram and let the ants have his crops.

One scene opens with a snoring plantation worker who awakens to find himself being eaten alive by ants. It was the ultimate lesson in snoozing and losing.

It was only a movie, but that indelible image reappeared in my head when ants invaded our house this week.

The first scouts appeared the previous week in a line marching skyward beside our back door. DC thought maybe a bird died or an egg broke in the nest above the door.

We should have taken them on right there. Now they have outflanked us. Some appeared on our kitchen cabinet a few days ago. Then they sent in the troops.

Ants are smart. They waited until DC was away on business. Our defenses were down. They're everywhere, I told her on the phone. She laughed. I didn't. They were crawling on the kitchen counter, on the wall, in the sink. And those were just the ones that could be seen. I didn't want to awaken one morning covered in ants.

Eventually they'll just leave, DC said. Uh-huh.

In India, the adherents of the Jain religion practice nonviolence, ahimsa, toward all life. The monks and nuns sweep the ground in front of them as they walk to avoid stepping on insects. That is a symbolically admirable and practically impossible way of life. Especially when your home has been invaded by flesh-eating ants.

But we try not to use poisons around the house, both for the sake of our dogs and because humans have heaped all the toxicity on the earth it can handle. I pull weeds around the patio rather than use Roundup. But what to do about ants?

My research found that most poisons work so fast that they only kill the forager ants, who never have a chance to take the poison back to the colony. Eventually the ants return.

But borax or boric acid in sugar water work slowly, so the foragers return to the colony with food that is lethal to ants in a lasting way. The ants currently are feasting on their destruction.

The thing about ants that is at once creepy and extraordinary is their similarity to us in their ability to get things done by working together and communicating. Actually, they might be better at cooperation than we are.

The Darwinian view is that all living things are either the hunter or the hunted, and most of us are both. That's the reality the primitive part of our brains reacts to. But scientists have found that some species thrive because they work for the common good. Referring to bees, the medical anthropologist Albert Villoldo writes, "Humans as a species have yet to discover what bees know: the survival of the individual depends on the well-being of the hive."

At the end of the movie Charlton Heston figured out that ants have no defense against fire, and he fortunately had plenty of gasoline.

Primitively speaking, so do I.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.