Living With Ants

Shortly after we moved to a small town in southern California from South Korea, I visited a friend who was living on the seventh floor of an apartment building in Los Angeles.

While washing my hands in their bathroom, I was surprised to see several, tiny ants crawling up the wall. I didn’t mention what I had seen to my host then, but afterwards the ants made me think

If ants of that size—about 2 millimeters in length—could climb all the way up to the seventh floor from the ground level, isn’t it comparable to humans climbing Mt. Everest? Why were they making such superhuman, er, I mean, super-insect efforts to climb such a height? Maybe, they hitched a ride with humans up the elevator. But what was there for them there to make a living? Whatever the reason, I was amazed by the power and resilience of the ants.

According to the encyclopedia, ants have been living on earth for more than 100 million years. They can be found almost everywhere on the planet. And for that reason, they have been called one of earth’s most successful species.

My admiration for ants, however, turned to horror soon afterwards. Our house which is a modest two-story wooden structure, built nearly 20 years ago, in an area, which, at the time of construction, apparently was a barren, almost desert-like field, was infested with ants.

Millions of ants must have been living in the area for hundreds of thousands of years before we humans invaded the area and began built our houses depriving them of their living space. Refusing, however, to give up their time-honored way of life, the ants obviously decided simply to move into the houses.

Successful insects or not, I resolved not to allow them to move in and live with us. Thus, my war against ants began, even at the risk of being accused of killing another living creature by animal lovers and environmentalists.

At first, I noticed three or four ants crawling around the house, and I killed them by pressing them against the floor with a thumb or the tip of a finger in a manner of fingerprinting at an international airport. Little did I know, however, that the sighting of a few ants was merely an indication of the existence of several hundreds of their fellows somewhere nearby.

One day, I woke up early in the morning while it was still dark outside, and went to the kitchen to have my first cup of coffee of the day. As I turned the light on, I noticed what appeared to be a big, black blob on the floor. Since it seemed to be moving, I bent down to take a closer look. To my great surprise, it turned out to be a group of no less than 50 tiny ants, busily moving around a morsel of breadcrumb dropped and left there on the floor the previous evening.

They did not give me a sense of fear as a swarm of locusts or bees might. But their sheer number, however small each one of them was, gave me a creepy and disgusting feeling and raised goose bumps all over my body.

But what surprised me more than anything was that as I approached them with intent to kill, they seemed to realize the alarming development right away and began scrambling for shelter. Hurriedly, I grabbed some tissue paper, wrap it around my fist and started crashing them. But they moved so fast I barely managed to catch only a dozen or so.

Until then, I did not know that ants could see, smell and above all, feel approaching danger so that they can move to escape quickly. Later, I learned that ants have eyes and antennae. Their eyes are made up of many lenses enabling them to see movements very well. Their antennae are special organs for smelling, touching, tasting and hearing. And using them, they can communicate with each other.

The ants had intruded not only into the kitchen but practically every part of the house, including the bedrooms and study.

Horrified, I rushed to a hardware store and bought what they called ant traps and a bottle of a chemical that would supposedly keep ants away. But I soon found that those devices and chemical were useless. Ants didn’t seem to be attracted by the traps while they freely crossed the lines of chemical that I had sprinkled around the walls
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The only effective weapon against them, I found, was a spray. Ants die instantly when they came in contact with the liquid but once the liquid dried out other ants would crawl around the area again.

I wanted to get rid of the ants not because I hated them. God knows, I am not killing them with hatred, passion, vengeance or, least of all, for the pleasure of snuffing the life out of such tiny, helpless creatures; I killed them simply because I wanted them to leave us alone and in peace in our own home.

Nevertheless I feel a sense of guilt. I tremble especially when I think of all those environmentalists whose power in this society is enormous. In our state, there are hundreds of farmers who are currently unable to grow any produce because authorities shut off water supplies to their farmland in order to save an endangered species of minnow living in dams.

What would those environmentalists think if they found out I was killing scores of helpless ants every day? But I take comfort in the thought that the ants that number in millions could never become an endangered species.

There is one positive aspect about the presence of ants in the house and that is, we are forced to keep our house squeaky clean. We were told that the ants would not bother people if there were nothing for them to eat. I still have some reservation about that information, however. For, we have seen ants where there was absolutely nothing to eat. But we are ready to do anything and everything as long as we can keep them out of our house.

Meanwhile, the situation was made worse by the presence of termites. We were told that our house was also under attack by the wood-eating insects. Now, the termites are a different problem all together. They are far more elusive and dangerous than ants as they could bring down the house if left to their own devices.

We called an exterminator who fumigated the entire house after covering it with plastic. And to our relief, the ants were also killed with the termites. The exterminator assured us that the termites would not come back for at least two years. As for the ants, however, he said they could come into the house again after only four days.

Well, that means that after such a brief victory, I have to resume my unending battle against the ants, if only to see which side is more determined, resilient and resourceful.
(END)