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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.”
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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.
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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?
