Get ready, 'cause we're gonna talk about ants again.
A few days ago, I discovered that my gerbils had chewed a hole in their water bottle, which presented a problem, because it meant they had no more water to drink. Knowing that gerbils will chew through anything, including PVC pipe, I had a second water bottle in reserve.
I went to dig it out of the cabinet in my desk. Bear in mind it had to be no later than 6:45 am at that point. I had to sift through a lot of things in the dark before I found the water bottle, but finally I did.
And what did I find?
That's right. A colony of ants. Inside my extra gerbil water bottle. Just hundreds of them. All up in there. As cozy as you please. You know how people say the word "seething?" Well, have you ever really seen something seethe? It's not a motion. It's hundreds of tiny little motions all happening at one time. Inside of a water bottle. That was meant for gerbils. But instead got taken over by a bunch of presumptuous, stupid little ants who also like to eat all of your food and hunt down your toothpaste.
I apologize in advance for the graphic nature of this blog post. I know ants give some of you guys the heebie jeebies, so if you would prefer, think of them as hundreds and hundreds of little sprinkles, jingling around all jolly-like inside my water bottle.
Moving on. My panic spurred me, giving me the mindless courage to act immediately.
Yes, it's true. Once I was sure there were no ants anywhere on my body, curiosity got the better of me. I observed the ants. Until they started crawling out of the water bottle. Then I killed them.
Obviously, I failed to consider physics. When you fill a bottle with water using a stream of moderate force, but you don't move the bottle when it becomes full to the brim, water will in fact shoot up out of it. Into the air. Threatening to tumble down onto your arms, no matter how many ants it carries. Water is blind. I think ants are blind, too, actually.
I'd been spooked. But there were still hundreds of ants in the water bottle, and my gerbils needed it. They needed it or they would die of thirst, a slow and painful death. And no, it could not be cured by running to Petsmart during lunch and picking up another water bottle before they had a chance to get very thirsty. That's ridiculous.
It took me a while to build my courage back up.
In case you can't read it, that little bitty print next to the river of death is a tiny collective scream.
As I flushed those ants down, down, down the drain and out of this world forever (one can only hope), I tried not to think about what it would be like to die this way. I was unsuccessful. I also noticed two really, really big ants swirling away on the current.
"But, how can that be?" I thought to myself. "Don't ant colonies only have one queen?"
The question haunted me all day, so, like the good little nerd I am, I researched it. Meaning I googled it. And this is what I learned:
1) Colonies will sometimes have multiple queens, especially new ones, as this helps them get started.
2) Queens produce worker ants, so at first, they're useful. But when the colony is fairly established, it will kill off surplus queens. Meaning the little worker ants that the queens put all that work into turn around and bite them to death, which takes kind of a long time and researchers aren't sure if the biting kills them or if they really just die of thirst. Because queens only drink what the worker ants bring them, and if your worker ants are biting you all day, they are certainly not bringing you anything to drink.
3) Knowing this is a possibility, queens have evolved such that, if they are sharing a colony with another queen, they will produce fewer worker ants. Because producing worker ants takes up a lot of energy, and if you might potentially have to fight for your life, you want to conserve all the energy you can.
4) HOWEVER, the more worker ants a queen produces, the stronger a chemical marker (or something to that effect) she gives off. When the worker ants go all angry mob on the queens, they tend to keep the one that gives off the stronger marker. Which makes sense--if they're only going to have one queen, they want her to be the good one.
5) But this STILL doesn't guarantee the safety of a queen ant. Sometimes the little worker ants go so berserk that they lose control and accidentally kill off ALL the queens. So, if Your Majesty decided to produce as many worker ants as possible to out-worker-ant-produce any other queens, you might still die. And you'd die more quickly, because you'd be really, really tired.
BUT WAIT, THAT'S NOT ALL.
By researching further, I discovered the thriving community of ant farm enthusiasts. And from them I learned that it is perfectly acceptable to populate your ant farm with ants you ordered off the internet, especially if you're just getting the ant farm started. But if you REALLY want the real deal, you trap your own ants and populate your ant farm with wild specimens. If you know what you're doing, you can catch ants.
And if the stars align and it's a full moon and it's also Friday the 13th on a Leap Year and your horoscope is favorable and the winds shift to the northeast and it's a good year for corn, you might just catch a queen. And then you can create a SELF-SUSTAINING ANT FARM.
Reading this, I imagined all the ant enthusiasts of the world having a conniption upon finding out that I, haphazard ant hater, had washed not one, but TWO queens down the drain that very morning in my clumsy, half-asleep and horribly ant-hating state. I didn't even know what I was doing, and plus it wasn't even a full moon, and I had caught two queens. Two. And killed them both. And their little worker ants, too.
Really, I could see it. Like Tinkerbell collapsing every time a kid says he doesn't believe in fairies, I could just see ant enthusiasts the world over.
In other news, it took one day for my gerbils to chew a hole in the second water bottle.
