I have been thinking about ants lately. This is hard not to do, as ants are the most significant hardship we have yet faced in our move to Belize. I'm not kidding. The ants are unmitigable. If the black ants are reduced in any great number, red ants move in to the territory now undefended by the black ants. The red ants are much worse, as they bite. When the red worker ants bite, it hurts. But when the red soldier ants bite, they sting, injecting a venom. This venom hurts, and causes a small deep blister, which seems to take longer than a burn to heal.
See Wikipedia, Red imported fire ant, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_imported_fire_ant
There are a number of ways to think about ants. Commonly, we think of them as individual organisms working in concert for the greater good of the nest. It is also possible to consider the nest as an organism, the individual ants as mere componants, cells, constituants, of the distributed living thing called the Nest.
Thought of this way, the Nest is a single living thing. It spreads out, sensing with a mobile distributed network of it's parts, each of which is a sophisticated extension of itself, capable of autonomously reacting to local conditions for the good of the Nest. The living protoplasm of the Nest, is scattered in little packets called ants, but the Nest is a type of living thing. It can be thought of as a meta-lifeform or hyper-lifeform. The Nest appears to pursue strategies with a purposeful intelligence, but that intelligence is emergent. It is a behavior that emerges from the instincts and intelligence of the ants that make up the Nest. This emergent intelligence has a greater scope of perception than any individual ant. It sees more, but knows less. It reacts to a vast quantity of perceptions, but it does so within the limits of instinctive ant behavior.
So imagine, the Nest, exercising a type of automatic decision making. It streams out bits of itself as probes, if a probe finds food, the probe returns leaving a scent trail to mark the way back to the food. If there are two sources of food, the nest will choose to send most of its transport bits to the safest one, as that route is more heavily marked. More ants returned from that route. The scent trail deteriorates over time, so the route to a more distant source will have a less strong scent trail, or signal, than a closer source. Based on circumstances like these the Nest can "figure out" to stream bits of itself to the source of food which offers the best compromise between safety and distance. Following simple rules, it demonstrates what looks like complex behavior, cunning, and forethought. It appears to be an amazing and glorious thing.
Allowing for a bit of anthropomorphism, it is possible to speculate on the situation of the individual ant. An ant may imagine that it's values, it's goals are the values and goals of the Nest. Such an ant would be mistaken. The Nest is a different order of life altogether. The Nest can not cogitate, it can not consider. It can not behave any differently than ordained by the instinctive behavior of the mass of ants that are it's parts. The ant might discuss the actions of the nest with other ants. Other ants might well say, "The nest is an abstraction, it is not a real thing, it is not alive, We are the nest." However as long as the ants identify with and serve the Nest, the Nest has an effect as if it is a real thing. It may be that the ant suspects that the behavior of the Nest will lead to the destruction of both the ants and the Nest. Other ants may call for reasoned discussion amongst the ants regarding the behavior of the Nest. Our ant might see that the Nest operates on a purely instinctive level. Reason, as well as other higher functions of intellect are utterly outside it's range of understanding.
Our ant may have seen Rebecca approaching, and while Rebecca's actions, and intentions would surely be incomprehensible to an ant, the ant might just have an intuition of danger. At a time such as this the ant may feel drawn to actions it can't quite fathom. Vague anxieties, inclinations to spend as much time away from the nest as possible. Other ants might also feel this in different ways. Some might work even harder to find and carry bits of food back to the nest. Others might become unhinged and attempt to collapse tunnels in the nest, or attack other member ants. At some stage of development in the Nest, all the ants will feel an indefinable tension, an undifferentiated fear. Somewhere one ant will go completely hoppers and pen something that begins, "turning and turning in the widening gyre, the soldiers can not hear the worker ants..."
But all ants know it's brightest before the storm. And this is proven out when a great glob of jam is discovered on the tile in the kitchen.
2 comments:
Sounds like you found a business opportunity: ant killing.
If Belize is "third world", is there such a thing as "second world"? Maybe that is the Walmart across the border. We were wondering if your area has zoning to keep Walmart out, or if there is not enough money to attract a Walmart? Eaton, OH fought to keep Walmart out and they built anyway.
No business opportunity there I think. I think most simply don't care about the black ants and pour boiling water on the red ant nests. If it bothers them much, there are insecticides available here that are far more toxic than I care to expose my children to. The ants are a challenge, but somehow we need to adapt. Rebecca had a lot of problems with this at first. To her ants were not just an annoyance, but an indictment of her housekeeping. She has gotten over this by visiting other women's houses. Spotlessly clean houses which nonetheless have ants. Also I managed to convince her that the ants are a valuable buffer from other crawlies such as tarantulas, scorpions, roaches, and snakes. You may think roaches are out of place in that list, but the roaches here are big, they fly, and they suck blood. They don't normally go in houses though. Probably because the ants would kill and eat them.
I doubt very much that anyone here wants to keep any employer out. There is a grinding unemployment here. Many of the people here desperately want a job of any sort. Some of the jobs pay around BZ$100 a week, for a five or six day week. That is US$1 an hour. I suspect you are correct in thinking there is not enough money here to attract Walmart. With one condition. There is money here. There are wealthy Belizans. But they have the mobility to go to the Walmart in Mexico. Wait a minute, you mean the Eaton between Oxford and Dayton? They put a Walmart there? Thats a shame, Eaton was a pretty town.
As for zoning laws, most things here operate on a common sense basis. If someone wanted to have a large pig farm in town, I am sure somewhere in some book someone would quickly find a rule to stop it. Unless maybe they were going to do a lot of hiring. But up and down the street a number of the houses have chickens. There are a few horses, some geese, probably some goats, though I can't recall any goats on my street. There are a number of stores and businesses, some run out of a residence. I suspect there actually are zoning laws here, but most people are unaware of them.
Walmart would have a major competitor here. There is a store called Cinty's. But thats a long story and I think I will make a post about that later.
And third world, second world, first world, all these terms are a bit out of date. I might say something about this in a post later but for now wikipedia has a decent explanation of the terms.
List of countries by Human Development Index, 2005
Third World
I am going to get off the computer and try and get Rebecca to answer the questions in your other comment. She seems to work all the time, and I am trying to get in the habit of making the computer available to her whenever she decides to take a break.
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