Living with Ants: Observations and Lessons from the Insect World

The Internet is full of remedies to kill ants with or without resorting to toxic chemicals. People discuss terminating them nonchalantly as though they were germs that ought to be wiped out from a hospital ward to keep patients safe.

There’s no need to resort to such drastic measures. The solutions to a harmonious co-existence with them are surprisingly simple and entail benefits for ourselves as well. Here are some simple steps:

•  – Plug the areas where they come out. You can use putty or cotton balls. In our house, they primarily come out from underneath the baseboard. Using a toothpick, and by wetting the cotton with an essential oil (ants hate tea tree, peppermint, cedar wood and citronella), I am able to wedge the soft fibre into any gap, thus preventing them from coming out into the
  open.
•  – Run a diffuser with your favourite essential oil to mask the smell when cooking. The stove’s overhead fan is not enough to suck all the odour. Virtually any essential oil has therapeutic benefits that will help improve your health or alleviate some chronic conditions. Peppermint, for example, alleviates headache and is an anti-inflammatory, to name just a few benefits.
•  – Place a few drops of tea tree oil on a small plate and leave it in your dishwasher if you are the type of person who doesn’t scrape and rinse your dishes thoroughly before putting them into the machine. This will deter ants from coming up through the tiny openings at the bottom of the machine.
•  – When you see ants, dab a cotton ball with some tea tree oil and place it a short distance in front of them. One whiff of it is enough to cause them to skitter back to where they come from. Or else grab them with a soft tissue and put them back where they come from.
•  – As a preventive measure, dab a cotton ball with tea tree or peppermint essential oil and throw it into a pantry cupboard. The alternative is to have your dry goods in glass jars.

•  – They have an excellent sense of smell. I admit I haven’t done my math, but given their tiny body and what they could smell from so far away, the equivalent for us would probably be like smelling something delicious from a few city blocks away. You may have seen a soft drink spilled on the side walk. Within a few hours or sooner, a mass of ants would be congregating at that spot making the most of the nutrients until there was no more and then they all would mysteriously disappear down some tunnels.
•  – They are always exploring. I have seen them climbing the smooth, slippery granite wall in the shower stall or plodding on the carpet in my study. In contrast to the hard wood floor, every step on the carpet for them is like climbing up and down a small dune. Repeat this a thousand times. The equivalent activities for humans would be trudging in the sand for hours or climbing a sheer vertical rock wall. And yet they push on and many will die from exhaustion.
•  – They are excellent builders and engineers. In the spring and summer, I would often see mounds of dirt pushed onto the surface from the cracks in the concrete of the driveway outside. Clearly they were building, maintaining or expanding some kind of ventilation or tunnels beneath the surface.
•  – They communicate. On many occasions, I have witnessed three, four or more of them “huddling” together, their heads almost touching. Clearly they were “communicating” or sharing information with one another.
•  – They are clean. On quite a few occasions, I have seen them take their dead and move them to the surface and leave them on the tile floor. As an experiment, I flicked the dead ants back down and inevitably, they would bring them back up for us to vacuum them away.
•  – They are intelligent. At times after being picked up and dropped off at a different location, I have observed them lie still, curled up, pretending to be dead for a while before moving again. (What animals use this as a survival strategy?) Sometimes they freeze on their tracks once they sense my shadow or the vibrations on the floor made by my movement.
•  – They are strong. I have seen them carry their injured/dead fellow ant long distance or pieces of food almost the size of their body. Gram for gram, they are proportionally stronger than humans.
•  – They are persistent. Once I plugged a gap in the baseboard with cayenne pepper powder (another Internet remedy) and sealed it with tape. They didn’t like the smell. However, that didn’t stop them from attempting to tunnel under a mini hill of spicy powder. Eventually they would find a way through.
•  – If leaving offspring is a criterion of success, then ants are more successful than us humans. There are way more ants on this planet than humans.
•  – They are sentient creatures, just as fearful of death as humans. On many occasions when they were suddenly picked up and deposited far away, they’d look really startled. But they quickly recover their composure and make a mad dash for safety.

The above observations concern ants’ activities above ground. Underneath, there’s an orderly and sophisticated society as any entomologists would tell you.

Do ants have a consciousness like humans? If consciousness is about having perceptions, thoughts, feelings, fears and awareness, then yes, these are very much sentient creatures.

Are we superior to them? Not at all. We are all different, each with a role to play in a place called planet earth. Imagine for a moment there were no ants. Organic waste would not break down as fast. Soil would not be aerated. Trees rely on these nutrients and healthy soil to grow and thrive and in the process release oxygen essential for the maintenance of life on earth.