I Have Been Stepping Over a Civilisation
🐜 Ants have existed for 50 million years, and I found out how impressive they are last week. From a book. About ants. That I chose to read as an adult.
I thought I knew ants. I expected a light nature read. Instead, the book quietly convinced me that whatever humans can do, ants do better.
It is like finding out aliens are real, except worse, because I have never seen an alien, but I have been stepping over ants my entire life without knowing I was stepping over a civilisation.
Some facts that humbled me:
- A few-days-old ant is already working and guarding the colony. Humans need 18 years before we can boil pasta, WITH the instructions on the package.
- One queen runs a colony of 5 to 8 million workers for up to 15 years. No re-election campaign, no scandals, no memoir deal afterwards.
- The queen mates once, stores up to 320 million sperm cells, and uses them for the rest of her life. The males all die right after mating, and then keep becoming fathers for years after their death. Even dead, they are getting more done than I am.
- All the workers are female. The males exist for one job, do it, and exit. Efficient. Terrifying. Efficient. Rough deal for the gentlemen.
- The queen starts the whole colony alone, eating 90% of her own eggs to survive until her first workers hatch. And I complain when I have to cook two days in a row.
Honestly, if ants ever figure out how to read, half of us will be working for them within a year. I have seen their org chart. It is better than ours.
Book: The Leafcutter Ants by Bert Hölldobler & Edward O. Wilson.
Highly recommended if you want to feel inferior to something six millimetres tall :)