As a child I frequently spent my summer days in the backyard crouched above whatever ant colony had the misfortune of taking up residence in my path. I was like a small god deciding what chaos to inflict upon these tiny creatures with a flick of my chubby fingers.
On one occasion, I tipped my can of Coke over to create a biblical flood of bubbly proportions that blocked the path of foraging ants leaving their nest. I watched as ant after ant followed one another in a mindless conga line toward the caffeinated chaos. Their motions would grow erratic, tiny feet and antennae thrashing in confusion and fear. “What do we do? Danger! How do we get home now? Ah!” Eventually, one of them would be tempted by the sugary scents emanating from the drink and would try to sneak a taste––only to be swept away in the current. I would watch in quiet observation as that ant would be followed by the one behind it and the next and the next, all falling to temptation and making the same deadly mistake. Mindlessly they marched to do their doom.
I was endlessly fascinated by these tiny creatures and how they seemed to lack minds of their own. Where one ant marched the rest would follow because they didn’t know any better. It made them easy to manipulate and play whatever game I had in mind for them that day––it wasn’t always a Coke flood.
Once I dropped a massive slimy earthworm right at the entrance of their nest and watched as ants streamed out after one another to attack it. The worm had no chance as the ants swarmed and gnashed their imperceptible jaws against its soft flesh. They attacked like a mindless mob, fighting in unison and covering the writhing worm until it was nearly invisible beneath the mass of murderous ants. The attack only ceased when the worm grew still. The ants gradually dispersed with some remaining behind to carry their deceased foe into the nest. The next order was given to the mindless numbers and, as a unit, whatever ants remained hauled the worm’s fat body through the entrance of the nest. I imagined the ants having some great feast somewhere deep in their underground tunnels. Or maybe they would feed it to their queen. Whatever the case, they soon enough returned to their regularly scheduled duties. A new ant trail had already begun to trickle out of the nest, each ant steadily pattering after the last.
My strangest encounter with the ants had nothing to do with my divine intervention at all. There was one particularly windy day––my mother hadn’t let me outside for fear of a tree limb or something falling and squashing me––and when the sun rose the next day the backyard was a complete mess of strewn leaves and debris. The scent of an oncoming storm hung in the air on that overcast day. But, oblivious to the looming danger, I bumbled toward the most recent ant nest I had discovered.
Even from a distance I could see something strange: a dark circle on the ground some distance from the nest like a shadow cast from some invisible source. The closer I curiously came to the shape the more obvious it became that it wasn’t a shadow. It was alive, pulsating––no, swirling in a strange rhythm. A mass that rippled with mindless motion. I crouched closer, and to my surprise, the strange shape was composed entirely of ants following one another. Frantically, each ant chased after the ant in front of it forming a circular donut of doom running to nowhere.
I was mesmerized by their misfortune. Every so often an ant would stop in its tracks, exhausted or maybe dead, only to be trampled by the ants behind it. Sometimes an ant would stray a little further away from the circle, antennae searching wildly for a way out, only to return to their spiraling suffering. In their hivemind unity they were running themselves into oblivion. They knew no better than to follow one another into destruction.
After some time, I grew unnerved watching the ants kill themselves––somehow different than my own destruction of their kind. Frightened, I fled back inside to seek the guidance of my mother.
“There’s nothing you can do,” she told me, turning away just slightly from the television, “they don’t know any better.”
She was telling me something I already knew.
“They lost their little pheromone trail back to their nest or whatever,” my father chimed in, “it’s called an ant circle––no, spiral, that’s it. Ant death spiral. Won’t be long now before they all keel over.”
He leaned back in his recliner, not even turning as he addressed me. He only briefly looked away from the TV when my mother gave him a slap on the arm.
As my mother chastised my father for talking so callously to me, it was my turn to look at the TV and see what I was interrupting. Someone was speaking at a podium out to a crowd of people wearing some variation of red, white, and blue. From the high angle of the camera as it panned toward the people attending, they looked less like individuals and more like one large moving mass. As they hung on the words of the man at the podium, the crowd cheered and rippled like a wave.