Ants

So I was just watching a video on Ants from the Natural History Museum online....
WHAT???
I learned something very interesting through giving over 28 minutes of my time to an Antamologist who recorded a lecture he gave at a university.
If you took all of the animals in a rainforest and created a pie chart to explain how much all of those animals weighed as a whole, what I mean is if you grabbed every ant in a rainforest and weighed them all at once, recorded the weight, and then did the with the other animals. Except the other animals are generalized. Like, you'd take every animal that fell under the mammal category and weigh them all together, then you'd take all of the reptiles through them all on a huge scale at once and weigh them, and then spiders as a group, and birds as a group. So on...
Anyway, almost a third of the pie chart would be allocated to the collective weight of ants.
How much does an any weigh?
Who knows, but one could be crawling on your neck right now and you might not even know. However, if a Panther from the rainforest was crawling on your leg or a python was making path across your back, well, you'd fucking know!
Yet, as a collective whole, ants weigh in on top.
That's a lot of ants, and considering as how they can lift up to 25 times their body weight, well, there's enough of those strong little fuckers to move the rainforest up to Canada if they wanted to. Hopefully they will too, I'm tired of swamps.
I don't have too much experience with ants, except that one time I got hammered when I was camping and I got the bed spins so bad I had to crawl out of the tent on all 4's to puke, and I passed out in a red ant hill. I didn't know until the morning when I had 100 small red bites all over my face, in my ears and down my neck. That totally sucked..
It was that night that my distrust for ants in general began. I mean, strong or not, why bully the passed out kid? Obviously I was too intoxicated to defend myself. I was kind of mad in the morning. Then I remembered all those times when I was a kid and I'd get my mom to boil the kettle for me so that i could take a scalding hot cup of water out to the garden and destroy every ant nest i could find, and giggle as their bodies contorted into death from the boiled water. Paybacks are a bitch.
Have you ever heard of 'Slave Maker Ants', perhaps not the most PC term in the book, but fuck, I didn't coin it.
This occurs when the Queen ant wanders into an already established ant colony and either kills or drives away all of the adults and queen ant, so that when the baby ants are born they can do her bidding. She litterally enslaves the colony and just sits down and lets the little guys do her work for her. It's kind of like the corporate takeover of Marks Work Wearhouse by the Canadian Tire Corporation, and I am one of the baby ants.
So lets do a quick review, there are more ants in the world than there are anything else. They can lift over 25 times their own weight, and they are colonized by the murderous agression of a woman. Me thinks this is reason enough to not trust an ant, but I'll give ya a few more.
You ever watch an ant run? Like see one near your foot and then try to stomp on it, but you miss, or it finds shelter in the tread of your sandal, and then it senses attack and books it. They can move. I always wonder, if you took a parking lot and got an ant to run as fast as it could across it, and then did all that dorky math shit to figure out how far a human would have to run to equal the same distance who would win? Well, it's the ant. I didn't do the math, I need one of my smarter friends for that, but I am confident, the ant would take it.
So they can run fast, climb walls and live in a cramped space.
I had a friend like that when I was smoking a lot of dope in highschool. Plus, they're ugly as all get out. I mean, there's just no redeeming quality. FUGLY!! And we all know that really ugly people can't be trusted either. They may seem nice, but a really ugly human knows they're a social abomination and they have plans......just plans....we may never know what they are either, oh, well, you might!?!? So, the same can be translated into the ant colonies of the insect world. If two really smart ants get together and leave the nest for a butt between scavaging, who knows what sort of rebellion could enter the planning stages????
Whew....I just got the shivers....you?
So the next time you throw hot water on an ant, or try to stomp on it as it's walking by, you better remember who you're fucking with.
I do.