The Ants are Marching

The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah

The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah

                The ants go marching one by one,

                The little one stops to suck his thumb

And they all go marching out in the big parade.

The ants go marching two by two, hurrah, hurrah

The ants go marching two by two, hurrah, hurrah

                The ants go marching two by two,

                The little one stops to tie his shoe

And they all go marching out in the big parade.

The ants go marching three by three, hurrah, hurrah

The ants go marching three by three, hurrah, hurrah

                The ants go marching three by three,

                The little one stops to climb a tree

And they all go marching out in the big parade.

The ants go marching four by four, hurrah, hurrah

The ants go marching four by four, hurrah, hurrah

                The ants go marching four by four,

                The little one stops to shut the door

And they all go marching out in the big parade.

The above song is sung to the tune of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” If you’ve forgotten the lyrics and would like to sing this song, the fifth ant stops to take a dive, the sixth

ant picks up sticks, the seventh ant stops to pray to heaven, the eighth ant stops to shut the gate, the ninth ant stops to check the time, and the tenth ant stops to say “The End.”

So why am I blogging about ants today? Because sometime around Easter is when the ants start marching into my house. When I had children, they were attracted to the Easter candy the kids often stashed under their beds or in their closets hidden from their siblings but not the ants. Last week I saw an ant in the living room, a black ant a little larger than the usual ones I get on my kitchen counter. I dispatched that lone scout and haven’t seen another one yet.

I find ants fascinating, but not in my house. Years ago back in the precomputer days, my husband discovered a bunch of flying ants near the house, or were they termites? I dug out the encyclopedia to research them and ended up spending several hours reading about ants. (These were not termites.) I was fascinated by them. Years later I read the book Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson, an autobiography of his life starting as a boy naturalist and his developing later as an entomologist studying ants all over the world. A university professor at Harvard (at least at that time in the 1990s) he won two Pulitzer prizes for his work. I loved his book and it increased my interest in ants. Of course, that doesn’t mean I want them building their nests in my perennial beds or have them scavenging for food in my house, but their social structure never ceases to amaze me. Each ant has its own job in the colony, and they communicate with one another. Watch as one ant comes up to another. They’ll touch feelers which convey some message. The scouts also leave a trail for other ants to follow to the food source they’ve found – on my kitchen counter, for instance. I don’t use poison in getting rid of ants in my house. I sprinkle borax at the back of my counters where they come in and spray the counters with window spray where they’ve left their trails. Eventually, they disappear. My sister said peppermint oil works, too.

In February I heard on NPR of a study being done on “Taking Traffic Control Lessons – From Ants,” by Brandon Kiem. The point of the discussion or study was that if humans acted like ants, they might spend less time in traffic. Audrey Dussutour, a University of Sydney entomologist, says. “We should use their rules.” She said, “I’ve been working with ants for eight years, and have never seen a traffic jam – and I’ve tried.” In her latest discovery, in the February issue of   the Journal of Experimental Biology, Dussutour’s team found that leaf cutters organized themselves into separate and tightly organized streams of load-carrying ants, and unburdened ants going in the opposite direction on wide paths, and then again on narrow twig paths like our one-lane roads. They discovered that the ants leaving the colony, automatically gave the food-bearing ants the right-of-way. Those ants returning without leaves gathered in clusters behind those with the leaves and traveled behind them.

The results of this study showed that the ants’ patterns strongly resembled human traffic patterns with the exception that humans don’t show that kind of forbearance. “One dominating factor in human traffic is egotism,” said University of Zoln traffic flow theorist, Andreas Schadschneider. “Drivers optimize their own travel time without taking much care of others. Ants, on the other hand, are not egotistic.”

If people behaved more like ants, there would be less road rage and fewer traffic accidents causing injuries and death. There are some people who feel driverless cars of the future may be the solution to traffic jams and accidents and cause our car travel to be more like that of the ants.

How do you feel about ants?

Are you looking forward to driver-less cars?