The battle was fully joined when I came upon it on a summer morning, although it wasn’t readily evident that it was a battle. Rather, it looked like a confused gathering of brownish-tinted black ants. It was unusual enough a sight, however, to grab my attention.
The mass of milling ants formed a foot-wide band across the entire width of the 12-foot wide concrete walkway that led to the public bathroom and bathhouse at the Cherry Hill Campground in College Park, Maryland.
The ant gathering was hard to miss. It was located about 10 feet from the building’s entrance, the heaviest concentration of activity in and near the narrow channel that separated one giant slab of the cement walkway from the other.
Intrigued, I stopped to watch. Although no entomologist, bugs have fascinated me since childhood.
As I studied the melee, I began to discern darker stationary dots among the movement. Puzzled, I got down on hands and knees – and nose near to the ground – I saw that the darker spots were actually sets of ants, each consisting of two insects locked in mortal combat while two or three others stood by. Whether the standbys were spectators or waiting their turn to take on the winner, however, I couldn’t tell. Nor why the onlookers didn’t simply gang up on one or the other? And sorry I was that I didn’t have a magnifying glass to closer study what was happening.
I knew enough about ants to know that they raided one another’s colonies for food and slaves and fought for territory or in defense of their nests and food supplies. But why these particular ants were fighting eluded me. For that matter, I was having a hard time distinguishing between the two groups, so alike were they in appearance.
But verily, this was warfare at its most primitive – mandible-to-mandible combat to the death. What, I wondered, had triggered the bloodletting? Or more precisely, the hemolymph letting. And to what end? Was it a riot gone wild, rebellion against the mother queen, territorial strife, or a longstanding feud between rival colonies that had erupted into open violence? Had a chance encounter between enemy scouts escalated into a tribal confrontation? Or had one colony’s Paris abducted the other’s Helene?
Absorbed in my observation and musings, I didn’t notice the portly gentleman who exited the bathroom/bathhouse until he was almost upon me. At which point I arose quickly from my knees and tried to assume a dignified pose.
“What is it?” he asked, perplexed. But whether his perplexity stemmed from the sight of the mass of ants or from seeing a grown man kneeling on the walkway I couldn’t tell.
“It’s an ant battle,” I said helpfully, thinking the information would satisfy his question, if not pique his curiosity. Instead, he gave me a wide berth, as one would a madman or fool. A reminder, if I needed one, that a grown man on his hands and knees studying ants on a public walkway wasn’t normal or condoned behavior and was likely to get me pegged an eccentric at best. Thereafter, I made sure to maintain a dignified pose as I continued to watch discreetly, so that when a second gentleman approached and remarked on “the mess of ants,” I feigned disinterest. “Hadn’t even noticed,” I said.
“Next time I come, I’ll bring a spray can of insecticide and take care of the problem,” he offered sensibly as he continued into the bathhouse, underscoring a fundamental difference between us. Whereas my initial reaction had been to lament the lack of a magnifying glass to study the phenomenon closer, his was the more typical and practical response to rid the walkway of the pests.
Mindful that I couldn’t simply stay put and study the battle to my heart’s content, at least not if I didn’t want to attract attention and be judged a lunatic – yet determined to observe what I considered a rare opportunity – my stratagem became one of indirection and dissimulation. Meaning that for the next hour or so, I returned to the spot every 10 or 15 minutes to check on the battle’s progress. But I did it under the guise of a leisure stroll past the place, a meditative visit to the nearby pond, or an actual trip to the restroom. Each time, I would make sure to pause, and if no one were around, squat quickly and take note of any new development.
Granted, it made for spotty, on-the-wing observations; and no doubt, anyone taking notice of my frequent trips to the area must have wondered about my repeated visits, or concluded I must have a bladder problem. My regret was that I didn’t have the excuse of childhood or an entomologist’s degree to justify my curiosity. Or barring that, that I didn’t possess the chutzpah not to give a damn what my fellowman might think of my behavior or me.
Still, my strategy served its purpose, to the extent that I was able to satisfy myself that it was indeed a battle, evident by the growing number of casualties that I saw on each visit. Indeed, by about 10 a.m. – when I judged the battle to be over, given that the two sides had withdrawn to their respective camps on either edge of the wide walkway – the abandoned portion in-between the two groups was littered with scores of dead ants, the largest concentration in the narrow channel where the fighting had been the fiercest. It struck me that if these were human bodies, carnage of such a magnitude would have elicited horror. As it was, however, most visitors to the bathhouse blithely crossed the area unaware of the dead ants beneath their feet.
It struck me also that the live ants, at least during my brief periods of observation, weren’t collecting the dead, as I had seen ants regularly do when they chanced upon a dead mate. Would recovery of the dead occur later? I wondered. Or were soldier ants killed in battle simply left to the elements?
True, a few ants at either camp were wandering among the dead ants nearest to their respective strongholds, but their movements appeared aimless and erratic. It was unfathomable to me if they were ministering to the wounded, grieving the dead, performing last rites or identifying and counting the bodies. Or were they simply satisfying some ghoulish curiosity?
These few wandering ants went from body to body, pausing now and again at one or another. Sometimes, one would lift a dead ant and carry it a short distance before dropping it again. It might then pick up another and place it alongside the first, or take it to a different location. After a few moments, however, each would seemingly lose interest in the endeavor and wander away. I could discern no reason or pattern to the behavior.
Nor could I figure why they moved certain of the dead ants and not others. These roving ants, moreover, never ventured more than a foot from their respective strongholds, leaving the wide expanse of the slab between the two camps virtually a no-ants land inhabited only by the dead.
To satisfy my curiosity as to the hostile nature of the two camps, I picked an ant from one group and dropped it near the other. Instantly, the home ants attacked the intruder and a small clump formed about the two combatants.
Admittedly, the sacrifice of the ant was a cruel way to test my theory. But as poet William Wordsworth wrote, it’s the nature of science “to murder to dissect.” Or so I justified my action.
Continuing to observe from my Olympian height, I watched a spider emerge from the grass next to the ant camp nearest me and run erratically across the width of the walkway in a zigzag pattern, pausing now and again to examine one or another of the dead ants. Were the spider’s ant encounters purposeful or accidental? It never lingered long at any one dead ant, nor did it carry any away. And eventually it vanished into the grass on the opposite side of the walkway near the rival camp, leaving me to conclude that its appearance on the scene was incidental.
Likewise, two large headed red ants next appeared on the scene and wandered among the dead ants, rushing from one to another without a discernable purpose. Soon, one returned whence it had come, and the other took off in a straight line away from the battlefield, traveling rapidly a distance of about 10 feet before going off the walkway into the grass. Was it carrying news of the battle to a distant colony, sounding an alarm, heralding the demise of a hated enemy, or deploring ant-kind’s violence? Or was its action even relevant? As usual, I had more questions than answers.
Resuming my musings, I wondered if one or the other side had won or it been a draw? Had the bloodletting settled some ancient score or fundamental dispute, or was the cessation of hostilities merely a pause in a continuum? Was the battle even deemed significant enough to warrant recording in the ant chronicles? Or was it merely another skirmish and routine bloodletting? All in an ant’s workday?
And still the dead ants lay on the walkway, apparently forgotten and left to the elements to dispose of. No ant chronicler that I could see roamed the field recording the event for posterity; no eloquent Abe Lincoln ant orator to hallow the ground with immortal ant words; and no Homeric ant to sing the heroics of the combatants.
Or maybe these things would happen later or were beyond my ken to perceive. Possibly, stories of individual battles were being told, songs sung, exploits bragged about, and celebration and mourning ceremonies already ongoing. What did I know?
Back at the two ant camps, however, business appeared to be returning to normal. And I too, I realized, had things to do and places to go, life to live. Already, I had whiled away a good part of the morning with my observations and musings.
Bees buzzed about the pink zinnias that lined the bathhouse’s exterior wall, cicadas screeched from the nearby cove of trees, red-winged blackbirds clung to the cattails that fringed the pond, and colorful dragonflies skimmed the water surface, chasing after one another or prey.
All in all, a typical day at the campground, but for the hundreds of dead ants littering the walkway, soon to be swept away by wind or rain. (2009)