Jul 25 2008
Ants: No Survival Instinct
My house has been attacked by another swarm of ants (one of the many reasons why I’m glad we’re moving at the end of the month). At least they’re not the horrible giant carpenter ants – these are just the small brown ones. Even so, who the hell wants a lot of any type of insect, small or not, in their house? If only our landlord wasn’t so cheap at times; she hired the laziest exterminator ever. He sprays in maybe 2 spots around the house and then leaves saying “I’ll probably have to come back.”
The sneaky bastards have tried every way of getting into the place: through the back door, the front door, the windows in one bedroom, then the windows in the other, through the bathtub (maybe they crawled up the pipes?) and even through the linen closet. Today they tried the back door again. Fighting the urge to scream as they circled around a piece of invisible food, I grabbed a bottle of 409 kitchen spray (the first thing I saw) and sprayed them down.
I cleaned everything up, but the fuckers kept coming back. After repeating the above steps three times, I became frustrated, sprayed another swarm of them, and left the dead bodies to float in the chemical pool. I figured it would serve as a warning and maybe the lemon smell would confuse the other ant’s radar or whatever. But it didn’t matter; they kept coming anyway, some of them crawling right into the puddle, which I found perplexing.
I assumed all insects had some sort of survival instinct. After all, when you go to step on an ant they immediately crawl away the minute your foot’s shadow covers them. So then why when faced with a pool of dead ants would they just charge right on through? Other than the fact that I thought ants didn’t like water, what is it about the lifeless bodies of the members of your colony that translates as “Go ahead”? Are ants the new lemmings?
Well let me tell you, if I were walking down the street and saw rows of dead people in front of the local drug store, I sure as hell would turn right around. And run.
3 Responses to “Ants: No Survival Instinct”
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Well…considering the size of their brains, can you be surprised?
This is definitely ant season, isn’t it! The thing with ants is that they leave “scent trails” wherever they go, and a dead ant is just another thing to them– either to be climbed over or cleaned up (ant colonies often have a graveyard where they put their dead).
My recent post here: http://ustravel.today.com/2008/07/22/ant-attack-getting-rid-of-ants-without-pesticides/
has my grandmother’s tried-and-true method of getting rid of ants. I don’t know how effective it is, but she swore by it for almost a hundred years.