I’m just an ant.
I was born in this colony from an egg the Queen laid, just like all my sisters. I started tending larvae when I was younger and smaller, then cleaning up rotting stuff in the colony’s garbage dumps as I grew, then bringing dead leaves back to the colony to grow fungus for food and carrying things twenty times my weight – not showing off, everybody does it. And once I got full-sized and in rippin’ shape, I was charged with protecting the colony from attacks by other ants and using my kickass mandibles to dig tunnels. And all the while I’ve lived peaceably alongside my eight million siblings, a part of the colony’s collective hive mind.
Like I said, just an ant.
But something’s been bothering me.
A few days ago, given my size and my mandible strength, I was promoted to outside forager. I was proud, sure, but it’s not about me, it’s about the colony, about that hive mind like I said. That’s a real thing, you know. We all somehow understand right away what’s best for everybody as a group without ever communicating -- bees and termites have it, too. I guess the hive mind figures I’m strong, but getting old, so if I’m foraging outside and a woodpecker or a caterpillar eats me, it’s no big loss. I get it.
Well, I was foraging with some of my sisters when one of them looks up at a liriope (which is a great plant for ants to explore -- low to the ground, easy leaves to traverse) and she suddenly shouts, “Aphids!”
You might as well have said there was a picnic somewhere, because the other girls made a bee line towards the aphids, which were hanging on the underside of a liriope leaf, using their piercing mouthparts to suck leaf sap. So I ask, “What’s up? Are we going to suck leaf sap, too?” And the ant next to me – Beatrice was her name – laughs and says, “Suck sap? Hell, no! Follow me and watch this.”
So, we walk up the leaf with the aphids on it, and Beatrice positions herself right behind one – the aphids are so stupid they don’t even look up at us -- and starts eating its poop! I’m sorry, there’s no other way to say it. Now, in her defense, it wasn’t animal lumps like deer pellets, which are chock full of protein but many species pass up. Instead, the stuff coming out of the aphids was like clear bubbles of syrupy sugar. Really -- it was beyond delicious! And the aphids could care less, they’re just sucking sap and pooping something between rock candy and maple syrup! “This is unbelievable!” I say to Beatrice, and she tells me, “Wait, there’s more,” and the next thing I know, once we’ve eaten all the aphid poop there is to eat, she and the other girls each grab an aphid in their mandibles and start walking away with them.
“Are we going to eat the aphids, too?” I ask.
Beatrice gives me the look you give to a stone cold idiot. “No,” she scoffs. “We’re going to take them back to the colony! Grab one and let’s go!”
So, I grab an aphid and follow the other girls home. Once we got there, we immediately headed down past the chamber where we relieve ourselves and the chamber where we let old corpses and discarded food rot. And it was then I saw something terrible.
It was a chamber filled with aphids, all of them just lying there, sucking leaf sap, and pooping sugary bubbles under the watchful eyes of a couple mean-looking sisters. Beatrice and all the other girls put their aphids down in the middle of the pile, and then bit their wings off, just like that! My aphid gives me a sad look, like it knows how bad this is going to be for the rest of its life, but I guess have a job to do, so I bite my aphid’s wings off, and it gives out a miserable little cry and looks away. The other girls all drop their aphids on the pile after they’ve bitten off their wings, and then they give each of them a leaf to suck, and Beatrice shouts, “Let’s go, kids, time to do your stuff” to the new aphids, like it’s a big joke. Then she turns to me and says, “C’mon, let’s get some more.” And off we go, leaving the new prisoners sucking sap and pooping delicious sugar bubbles.
Well, I found it very troubling – I couldn’t sleep that night for thinking about it. Sure, sugary poop bubbles are delicious, but who are we to subjugate these aphids? And the more I considered it, a terrible thought came to me – what if we don’t have the moral right to do this? What if we’re condemning the aphids to a life of subjugation while we appropriate their labor? What if our entire colony is built on a foundation of oppression? What if this whole “hive mind” thing is just a tyranny of conformity that blinds us to a much more difficult reality?
At that moment, I realized our colony had an “aphid problem.”
The next morning, we lined up wordlessly – hive mind again -- for another day of foraging. Beatrice was there right in front of me, and I confessed my concerns to her.
“You’re worried about the aphids?” she asked, astonished. I shrugged as best I could in a shoulder-less, ant kind of way. “Don’t worry about the aphids,” she scoffed. “We feed them, we protect them, they have a great life.”
“We bite their wings off!” I protested. “They’re prisoners! Slaves!”
“It’s for their own good,” Beatrice said as we started out foraging. “If we didn’t take them back to the colony, they’d be finished – like that,” she said, intimating a snap with her foreleg. “Did you ever see a ladybug or a lacewing tear up an aphid on a rose or a tomato? It’s not pretty.”
I let the conversation drop and after a few hundred yards we found an ice cream cone some kid must have dropped, so we spent the rest of the day carrying bits of it back home. But after the day’s work, I stopped by the chamber where the aphids were, just to look. There they were, sucking sap, pooping their magic bubbles, and if one of them took a break, a guard ant would subdue them and stroke their abdomen until they reflexively got back with the program and pooped some more.
Right then and there, I’d had enough. I decided to take this matter to the top – right to the Queen.
But when I got to her chamber, I was totally unprepared for what I found. The Queen was enormous, I mean, four or five times the size of a regular ant such as me. And she was busy laying eggs – they came out boom boom boom, like a paint ball gun. I was scared to death, but I cleared my throat to get her attention and she whirled around – her giant head was bigger than my abdomen – and she glared at me before speaking in the loudest, deepest rumble I could ever imagine.
“WHAT IS IT?”
I guess I got her upset, because suddenly the place stank to high heaven – her pheromone dial must have gone to eleven. I almost evacuated myself right there! But I got myself together enough to squeak out, “We have a problem with the aphids.”
She popped out a few more eggs, glaring at me all the while. “AREN’T THEY POOPING SUGAR ANYMORE?”
“No, they’re still pooping. But, we’re kidnapping them,” I said, “holding them prisoner against their will! Biting off their wings, it’s unethical, morally wrong! It’s as if there are two laws, two sets of rules, one for the ants and one for the aphids! And I, for one, object!”
“YOU OBJECT?” she bellowed. “WHO ARE YOU TO OBJECT?” More eggs -- boom boom boom.
“I’m me, just a sister ant, and I’m voicing my opinion –”
“YOUR OPINION? YOUNG LADY, DID YOU EVER HEAR ABOUT ‘HIVE MIND?’”
“Well, of course I have, Your Majesty, but—"
“ AND DO YOU KNOW WHAT ‘HIVE MIND’ MEANS?” I was forming an answer when she made it clear she wasn’t waiting for one. “I’LL TELL YOU WHAT IT MEANS. IT MEANS LAW AND ORDER!”
I was about to argue the point, when she cut me off again “IF WE LET THEM, THE APHIDS WOULD BE RUNNING WILD IN THE TUNNELS! THEY WOULD BE STREAMING INTO OUR CHAMBERS, UPSETTING OUR WAY OF LIFE! THERE WOULD BE LAWLESSNESS THROUGHOUT THE COLONY!”
“But do we have to bite off their wings off, or leave them imprisoned in the dark, for that matter, without a life of hope, or purpose, or meaning? Must they live as slaves, living in fear and despair? What makes us better than them? We’re all sister insects.”
“THEY ARE BETTER OFF WHERE THEY ARE – IN FACT, THEY’VE NEVER HAD IT AS GOOD AS THEY DO NOW!”
“Maybe we could let them keep their wings, or time to rest, or maybe some lighting –”
“YOU’VE REALLY DRUNK THE KOOL-AID, HAVEN’T YOU?” the Queen said, and she didn’t have to say she meant real Kool-Aid, with sugar, not that bogus chemical stuff.
This was not going well, I thought, and my feeling was confirmed when a few of the ants that guarded the Queen approached me and gave me the old “move along” with their antennae. So I did.
So, that’s what’s happened. I’ve still been going on foraging trips every day, and sometimes we bring back more of these poor, oppressed creatures, but I keep an eye out for a moment and a place where I could make a break for it. One ant alone in the world doesn’t sound like a good thing, but on the other hand, I’d be small, almost not worth any predator’s effort, I tell myself – who’s ever seen a solitary ant? And there’s plenty to eat in the world. But still, it’s scary out there.
And then the other day, we were coming back from foraging and dumping a new bunch of aphids onto the pile and biting their wings off and stroking their abdomens to get them to poop sugar bubbles, when the ant next to me – Josephine was her name – looks at me and says, real quietly, “Doesn’t this all seem wrong to you?”
So…you never know.
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