Arshid Malik
Where? Everywhere I tread in my house. Where do these creatures come from and assemble like an army within a minute or two. I am really surprised by the way ants work their way into every edible item that is not vacuum packed. This happens in my house and I suppose it happens everywhere.
I see an ant crawling on the floor in my house searching for food to eat. As soon as this ant catches the glimpse of the food stuff other ants start following and “ant express” is ready to carry along anything it find on the way back, be it hundred times its own size. That is remarkable. And another thing about ants is that they never give up. They keep on trying and trying to carry some eatable across the floor or up the wall and no matter how many times it slips the ant doesn’t give up. It keeps steady till the job is done.
Some digging into the knowledge base gave away tremendous secrets about the ant world. Ants have been on Earth for millions of years. A fossil of an ant 92 million years old was found in New Jersey in the United States (it had to be the US like the aliens, if you happen to recall what I am talking about). The fossil shows that ants were around when the dinosaurs roamed Earth. How is that for takers?
Ants are practically called the janitors of the world because they do a lot of clean-up jobs. With their strong jaw-like mandibles, ants can cut up just about anything and haul it back to their colony. They can make a meal out of dead leaves or dead insects. They even cart away small birds and mammals after they die. Isn’t that surprising?
Groups of ants live in a social group called a colony. Some colonies are extremely large, with millions of individual ants. Ants spend most of their lives inside the colony. Colonies are home to three different kinds of ant family members. Each colony has a queen. A queen is a large female ant who spends her life laying eggs. There also are a few males with wings called drones. There are thousands of workers, all of whom are female. Workers are very busy and active. Usually, worker ants are the only kind of ant you’ll see outside the colony.
Ants and people have an unusual relationship. Interestingly, we have many traits in common with ants. Both species work, live in colonies or communities for the good of all, and play a strong role in shaping our environment. Or is it so? The point I am trying to make here is not to update your knowledge which you can always do with a quick search on the internet, but to compare the status of these two different yet quite identical species.
Ants are so tiny. Don’t we occasionally refer to something too small as an ant sized? And we are so big with such colossal heads. Obviously the grey matter that sits in an ant’s head is peanuts compared to the grey matter inside our heads. Yet ants are so organized and some research studies show that worker ants hate each other but when it comes to work they coordinate as if they are a single entity. That’s discipline and I salute them. Compared to ants, what are we? We are socially defunct species which has progressed a lot on scientific and technical levels but has hit rock bottom when it comes to social integration. We are so aggressive towards each other almost about to cut each other’s throats over petty matters. We just don’t know how to live. We have junked our survival. And in comparison to us, human beings, ants are better off. They work and follow their routines without jinxing the survival of the whole race.
This might seem like too much than a spoonful but it is the truth. We are supposed, why supposed we are practically on the highest pedestal of evolution and we are worse off than tiny insects. What have we done over the centuries of our survival on this planet? Not much, I guess. We have only plundered what nature had preserved for all the species on this planet. And on the other hand the tiny “janitors of the world” have made this planet a better place and continue to do so.
