Kenny Noh

Illuminated by streetlight, there were multiple moving lines, each made up of individually chaotic particles that revealed their purpose only when observed in aggregate. I gazed on, entranced, wondering what motivated each speck to scamper her own way, and yet adhere to an overriding order all the same. It was a warm summer night; I was 11; the playful cheering of my peers on the playground faded into my subconscious as my focus on the ants intensified. Their epic history unfurled before my eyes, countless individuals toiling relentlessly to ensure the prosperity of the colony, achieving feats no lone ant could even conceptualize, let alone dream of.

What captured my eye was not the swarming trails with hundreds of small ants; these I had observed before. This time, something was different. In between the common workers, there were bigger winged ants. Those alates used the cornerstone of the playground as their launch pad, like airliners queuing on the tarmac. What I witnessed that night was not an aimless procession; it was a rare culmination of a mature colony’s efforts: a nuptial flight.

The next day, I found myself in the same place, and fortunately, a single ant remained, extraordinarily massive, scratching at the dry earth. After researching the ants’ behavior the previous night, I now understood the opportunity before me. I delicately collected the founding queen, and began raising my first colony, Camponotus concavus.

At first, my purpose for keeping the colony was simple entertainment: the drama that unfolded as the fragile queen refused food while stoically digging the founding chamber, laying eggs, and waiting for the first worker to hatch. But soon, I began to form intrinsic inquiries that promised to elucidate the mysteries of life. Why did only the first-born worker explore outside the nest? Why did another stay completely still at the entrance of the nest, antennae oscillating? Without any observable form of communication, how did they know what to do? These questions lingered in my mind, insisting on their own significance.

One day, I found my queen in the food container, completely frozen. Her stillness was different from her usual restless fidgeting in the nest chamber. I feared that her transit to the feeding room was a final act of desperation, or perhaps suicide, motivated by factors only an ant could perceive. With a heavy heart, I buried her carcass at the playground where she was born.

After that, my naive curiosity was supplanted by a determination to deconstruct the cause of the collapse. I scoured the internet for every available resource and painstakingly recorded my personal observations. But every answer I uncovered begged for new questions. I acquired additional queens to conduct informal experiments, discovering fascinating patterns: specific relationships between workers’ time allocation, the distance between foraging paths, and the rate at which brood chambers expanded. Imperceptible imbalances, like humidity, food distribution, temperature, and pollution, could have cataclysmic impacts. When distributed by a new food source or fluctuating humidity levels, workers redistributed tasks immediately, forming new systems on the fly. It was as if the colony were governed by equilibrium itself, with each innocuous interaction reinforcing a virtuous cycle that would ensure collective survival.

For me, ants are more than just a charismatic fauna; they are a microcosm of civilization. In some ways they illustrate our follies; just like us, they engage in the horrific and wasteful act of war. However, in other aspects we have much to learn from them. When it comes to the existential threat of climate destabilization, ants would have already acted instinctively to correct the problem if they were in our shoes. Following the model of the ants, we should strive to create a structure of incentives that motivate each individual to act in accordance with the common good. And although we lack the ant’s systemic intuition, we possess the individual intelligence to engineer a society that mirrors myrmecoid efficiency.