Pest and Disease Images Library/bugwood.org

I was never the first to see them until they became all that I saw. My daughter would see them before I did because she lived at their level and has good eyes. My wife would see them before I did because she was the first to get out of bed. I would wake up and go to the kitchen, and she would already be standing on a chair in her nightie, like the housewives in fifties sitcoms who were scared by mice. She'd have a blue bottle of glass cleaner in one hand and a roll of paper towels in the other, and she'd be engaging in a solitary orgy of prophylaxis. Everything from the pantry — the cookies, the crackers, the cereal, the dried fruit, the honey — would be sitting on the counter, sealed in ziplocks. Sitting next to them would be another half dozen ziplocks stuffed with paper towels stained blue as hydrangeas by glass cleaner and then flecked with brown. Some of the flecks were still alive and writhing; most were dead, stiffened into tiny spurs as individual as snowflakes. My wife would have looked like a scientist collecting samples for an experiment if she didn't also look like a soldier who had been at war for too long and was tired of the killing. The walls would be shiny with glass cleaner, which, since we were averse to pesticides, was our preferred poison, and the glass cleaner would be in the shape of the funnel clouds of alien invaders that had streamed from the outlets, from the tiny cracks in the walls, from the gaps in the window frame. The invaders scattered once they were under attack, leaving my wife to hunt them down one by one in corners and cupboards and on the countertop, revenge-movie style. It would be seven in the morning, and she'd have been already at the task of improvised extermination for a half hour or so, driven by the need to repel the invasion before my daughter woke up and saw it. The poor child grew up with her house under siege, but she still got pretty worked up by the knowledge that her house was home to not someone but rather something else — that she, an only child, had to share after all. She was never blasé about it, especially when she was the first to see them running in a line along the floorboards or clustered in a blob in the bathtub. She would do what any sane person would have done, though she was still very young:

She would scream.

The Lord God first divided the darkness from the light. Then he divided the heavens from the earth and the earth from the sea. Evolution did the rest: It divided the earth between humans and ants, and in so doing created another fundamental dichotomy. There are billions of humans on earth, and trillions upon trillions of ants — an estimated 1.6 million for every human being. If the earth were a scale, and all the humans were placed on one side and all the ants on the other, it would not budge. Ants have answered the ever-expanding human biomass with an ever-expanding biomass of their own, so that the planet is poised, teetering between its two most successful civilizations — each of which is social, aggressive, expansionist, and well suited for war.

I am here with a report from the front. I am here to tell you that the numbers suggesting an equivalence between ants and humans are not fanciful scientific estimates but rather reliable indicators of what to expect if ants invade your home — or if, from the ants' point of view, you decide to live on top of an ant colony. If you think the numbers sound like abstractions, if you wonder what deranged census-taker came to the conclusion that in the shadow of each and every human being there lives a hidden host of 1.6 million, well, that only means you haven't attempted the experiment of peacefully coexisting with them. If you do, however, you will find that the numbers sound just about right. Three humans live in my house, which would mean by that calculation, 4.8 million ants might live around it, licking at the walls or, more often than not, infesting them. But, hell, I'm sure I counted 4.8 million just on my daughter's swing set, which we had to dispense with in part because its steel tubes regularly poured forth ants and ant larvae like sand, and my daughter finally freaked out. I'm sure I counted something close to 4.8 million the day I turned over my canoe and figured that its bottom was filled with wet leaves, until those leaves started to vibrate en masse, started to move. "The numbers are just incredible," says Mike Rust, a professor of entomology at the University of California at Riverside. "We'll do population surveys at night. We'll go to a house and put out ten sugar-water stations around the house and another ten around the property. In the morning, the sugar water will be gone, and we'll have counted six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand ants. And that's in a night."

And yet the numbers aren't the worst part. The worst part is the intelligence of the numbers. A few years ago, I interviewed the great biologist E. O. Wilson right before he and his colleague Bert Hölldobler published their magnum opus, The Superorganism. The book, a study of ant societies, was an exploration of the notion that ants are such organized organisms that they almost don't count as individual organisms at all but rather as cells of the colony they serve. The colony is the superorganism, and as Wilson told me, "an ant colony is far more intelligent than an ant." I'll say. An ant by itself is an inoffensive creature, at worst a crunchy annoyance, smidgeny and obsessively clean and, above all, dumb, with a pindot of a brain. An ant by itself is not going to get any ideas... the problem being that it's rarely by itself, that it's representative of something, and that what it represents not only has ideas — it has designs. Wilson's book proposes that what an ant colony possesses is a kind of accumulated intelligence, the result of individual ants carrying out specialized tasks and giving one another constant feedback about what they find as they do so. Well, once they start accumulating in your house in sufficient numbers, you get a chance to see that accumulated intelligence at work. You get a chance to find out what it wants. And what you find out — what the accumulated intelligence of the colony eventually tells you — is that it wants what you want. You find out that you, an organism, are competing for your house with a superorganism that knows how to do nothing but compete. You are not only competing in the most basic evolutionary sense; you are competing with a purely adaptive intelligence, and so you are competing with the force of evolution itself.

And the worst part about that — the worst part about discovering that the ants in your house are actually emissaries of the enormous teeming brain in your backyard — is that it worsens the other worst parts, of which there are many. For example, I have found ants in my underwear. Lots of them, which I didn't find until I put the underwear on. As a person who has had ants in his underwear, however, I have to say that what makes their presence particularly irksome is not the momentary discomfort but rather the knowledge of why they're there. They're not just passing through, you see, on their way to somewhere else. They're not in your underwear by accident. They're nation-building. They're extending the range of their civilization, and they're doing it in your drawers. Sure, ants have many excellent qualities, and these are well-known. But once you figure out that those excellent qualities are being turned against you, they become unendurable, unforgivable. You learn from watching old cartoons that conga lines of ants are strong enough to steal watermelons from family picnics. You learn from having ants invade your house that the old cartoons are actually documentaries. With their strength, with their industriousness, with their endurance, with their organization, with their cooperation, with their altruism, with their discipline, and, above all, with their adaptability, the ants will contest you for everything you own, from your underwear to the glass of wine you leave on your desk.

Yes, ants drink. I learned this last year, and for some reason the experience qualified as one of the bad ant stories. I was working late in my office, with a glass of red wine. I went downstairs for a few minutes, and when I came back, I picked up my glass to drink, only to feel ants scurrying across my wrist, a touch like the breeze. I looked at my fingers, and they were alive with ants. It took me a fraction of a second to figure out where they were coming from. Because they... well, they couldn't want my wine, could they? But they did. They were traveling up and down the wineglass stem. They were drowning in the wineglass bowl. I had been an instant away from drinking them. And so I killed them all with the tips of my fingers, because even more than the ants that ended up in my underwear, the ants that found their way into my wineglass let me know that they wouldn't allow me to get away with anything, least of all mercy.

Joe Zeff Design

When I interviewed E.O. Wilson, I told him about my ant problem. I found out that to E. O. Wilson there is no such thing as an ant problem; there is only the opportunity for study. He grew up as an only child in south Alabama and turned to ants for the society they offered. He told me that wherever he goes in the world, he is never alone, since wherever he goes in the world, "there are the ants," his old friends. He has the gentleness of a man who has lived his life among very small things, and his recommendation for my ant problem was simply and beautifully put: "Be kind to them." He said the ants I described sounded like European pavement ants, in which case I should just find the crack or the hole they're using to enter the house and put a little boric acid around it. "It repels them," he said.

Dr. Wilson was wrong. He knows more about ants than any human being on the planet — he is the human emissary to the half of the planet that is owned by the ants — but he was wrong about the kind of ants that had infested my house, and he was wrong about what would be required to stop them. And what led him down the path of error was his optimism that the ants invading my house could be stopped. They couldn't be, because they were not European pavement ants. They were Argentine ants. Argentine ants came to the United States in the 1890s with a coffee shipment bound for New Orleans. They are small and brown, and if in many ways they seem like "typical" ants, that's because they've made themselves typical. There is nothing particularly offensive about them — besides their unstoppability. There is, indeed, nothing particularly interesting about them besides their unstoppability. Wilson wrote The Superorganism under the spell of the leaf-cutter ant, which began growing and harvesting mushrooms twelve million years before humans did and so can make the claim to being among the first of the planet's civilizations to practice agriculture. The Argentine ant grows nothing but more Argentine ants and practices nothing but ubiquity. It is not a mound ant; it nests in topsoil or mulch or pine straw and moves around the country with potted plants and seedlings. It is a transient species — what entomologists call a tramp species — that takes advantage of human transience. Though it will bite in defense of itself, it is not considered aggressive, except in terms of its spread. It generally has no sting, but there is evidence that it can compete for territory with the fire ant, whose sting is fierce. The Argentine ant is faster than the fire ant. The Argentine ant outcompetes everything in its range by the speed with which it establishes outposts of its colony — by the speed with which it reproduces and moves around its hideous, granular, shiny, pasta-colored, hourglass-shaped, grublike larvae. It has a ready source of food outside your house in the "honeydew" — the sweet anal effusions — of sap-eating pests like aphids; if it decides to move in, it's less likely to be drawn by food than it is by water and warmth. It is well adapted to humanity's urban and agricultural environments but less well adapted to the climatic extremes we've learned to tolerate, and so it tends to invade in the droughts of August and in the first frosts of October. There might be worse ants, but there might not be as dominant an ant as the Argentine, especially in the American Southeast and in southern California, where 85 percent of the people paying exterminators are paying them to kill or drive away infestations of Argentine ants.

I learned about the Argentine ant from Mike Rust, the Cal-Riverside entomologist, and from professor Dan Suiter, an entomologist at the University of Georgia who also works for the state extension service. They are both more hawkish on the subject than E. O. Wilson could ever be, and both do what he would never do, sharing their knowledge with private exterminators. "It'll take a lot more than boric acid," Rust says. "It won't control them, believe me. They're a fairly major pest problem. They displace other ants, other insect species. In California, they've displaced the horned toad. Kids learn in school that ants are very industrious — they're the good gals, right? But Argentine ants are invasive, and because they're invasive, you've got to deal with them. Of the twenty thousand species of ants, only about a dozen have been able to urbanize themselves really well. This ant is one of them. Humans carry around with us German cockroaches and houseflies. Argentine ants are another."

Both Rust and Suiter also have worst ant stories. Indeed, both men are quick to give the impression that they've seen some shit, though not necessarily as professionals — as civilians. "One time I left a warm computer battery on the floor," Suiter says. "When I came back, I thought it was covered in cotton. But it was covered in Argentine ants. The white stuff was the larvae. There were five thousand larvae on the battery and another five thousand ants. They'd moved the whole brood to the battery, literally overnight. But this is not unusual. When my printer is warm, ants crawl in and out of it. Basically, whole colonies come through the walls."

"One day my wife called me," Rust says. "She said, 'They're in the freezer.' I went home, and there they were. There were two hundred thousand Argentine ants at the bottom of the freezer, frozen to death. I have no idea what they were doing there, but we took pictures."

The consequence of studying an unstoppable species is that neither Rust nor Suiter thinks Argentine ants can be stopped. "Baiting doesn't work a lot of the time because the colonies are so big, you can't put out enough bait," Suiter says. "If a particular home has an Argentine ant problem, the likelihood is that the ten houses surrounding it have a problem as well. That's how large the colonies are."

"In Riverside, we're essentially living on top of a large Argentine anthill," Rust says. "This presents a problem because whatever bait you use, you have to use a lot of it. On the West Coast, there's a lot of concern about the quality of our waterways, and the fear is that a lot of fouling is the result of Argentine ant treatment."

It is what makes this story — or any story about a siege, real or imagined, natural or human — a political parable: the question of what we'd be willing to do in order to repel it; the question, more pointedly, of what we'd be willing to lose in order to win. My wife was willing to go on predawn killing sprees, bottle of Windex in her hand. My exterminator was willing to put down useless baits and gels, the idea being that baits "kill the queen," when in fact Argentine ants are polygynous, which is to say rife with queens, crawling with them. I was willing to kill the ants that filched our food, crawled into my computer, ran sorties on my desk, or swam in my beverages — it wasn't the ants so much as their presumptions of intimacy that bestirred some atavistic side of me — but in general I followed Wilson's advice. I was kind to them. I let them be, so long as they didn't get too close. Oh, hell, I let them in.

Then I became a father.

I knew we had ants. We had ants the way beach houses have sand — our house was gritty with them, textured. Our car, occasionally, would be gritty with them, when, say, a doughnut was forgotten in the front seat and a molten core of ants would come bubbling up out of the cracks in the driveway and turn the car's interior as brown as melted chocolate bars. I just didn't know we had an ant problem until we brought our daughter home from China.

The worst part? The worst part was what should have been the best part. The worst part was when my daughter was old enough to take a bath in the big bathtub, rather than in a plastic insert. The world expands for a child at that moment, but at that moment — at that very instant — so did the influence of our ants. I turned the spigot, and the faucet, instead of flowing with water, hocked up what looked to be a clot of mud or a gusher of oil. It was, of course, the avatars of some ancient and simplistically perfect Argentine genome, and when the water followed, it dispersed them all over the tub. My daughter watched in fascination and horror — with a "you're going to put me in there?" look on her face — as I activated the showerhead and washed the first wave down the drain. Then I did put her in there but noticed immediately that either a second wave of ants or the survivors from the first were floating on the surface, like spices in a crab boil. I began skimming them off with a plastic cup. "Daddy, what are you doing?" "Nothing, honey." But she knew. And that was the worst part.

She knew the ants better than I did, as well she should have, since her entire life in America had been spent in their profuse company. In peak season — which is to say about half the year — she rarely took a bath without at least a few ants salting the water or trundling along the margins of the tub; she rarely washed her hands without ants bubbling up out of the drains, instead of going down. A modern parent, my main concern for my daughter was that she be spared not the spectacle of Argentine ants invading her home but rather the memory of torturing, maiming, and killing them. Be kind to them, I counseled. They might not have the right to be here, but they have the right to be...

She wasn't having it. She started calling our house the "ant house," and she was delighted when she learned the word emergency, because she could use it to alert us to the latest manifestation of the colony's interest in our — her — home. Indeed, many of the worst ant stories begin with our daughter crying, "Emergency! Emergency! Mommy! Daddy! Come! It's an emergency!" as when we came back from summer vacation two Augusts ago and decided to grill outside on the Weber. I lit the fire and went inside to prepare the meat. My daughter stayed outside, and so when I heard the words "Emergency! Emergency!" I went running and was grateful to find that she hadn't caught fire. She was, however, pointing at the Weber and saying, "Ants, Daddy — ants!" I looked and said that I didn't see any. The Weber was enameled black, as always. Then the enamel began to seethe, and began to break up, like some experiment in the disassociation of matter. There had been tends of thousands of ants in the bed of soggy ash at the bottom of the grill, and when I lit the coals, they covered the cover, until that got too hot, and the whole scene was like a myrmicine version of the Hindenburg disaster, with cooking ants spilling off the top of the Weber and their horrible glittering larvae streaming through the slots at the bottom, while my daughter ran around screaming the one word that described what she saw.

That was a bad one — a bad ant story. But that wasn't the worst ant story. The worst ant story, at least insofar as my daughter is concerned — and the worst ant story insofar as my daughter is concerned automatically becomes the worst ant story — was the time my daughter took her bath without me. I was so proud of her; she was being a big girl. Then I heard a lethal kind of splashing in the tub, as if a shark had gotten in the water. I ran into the bathroom, and what I saw was a peony-sized bloom of ants whirling in the water and at the same time coming apart, like an oil slick. And my daughter was in the water with it, and what made it the worst of the ant stories was not only that they were on her shoulders and in her hair; it was that she was gleefully drowning them while exclaiming "Die, die, die!" in an utterly convincing exhibition of how exigency trumps ethics and how in evvery siege lies the death of liberal dreams.

So like every authority figure whose authority is in question, I went about the business of drawing lines. And the line I drew was this: No ant shall ever find refuge in my daughter's room. This turned out to be pretty easy to accomplish because next to my daughter's room is my office, and I was offering them the consolations of kindness. As long as they stayed on my windowsill, which became the permeable border between ant and human civilizations, I let them be and allowed nature to take its course by allowing spiders to prey on them. I wanted to be able to live with the ants because I had trouble living with my childhood memories of slaughtering them; I was haunted by gothic memories of interfering with nature, and now I was haunted by nature itself, and it was more gothic than I imagined. When the historic rains came to Georgia last September, the ants came with them; my office leaked freshets, and on the freshets floated fist-sized balls of ants protecting their terrible brood. That was a pretty bad ant story. But there's always an ant story worse than the story before, so here is another one: A few months ago, in late winter, I was working late in my office. I hadn't noticed any ants on the windowsill, so I placed my water bottle there, neglecting to fold down the straw. A few minutes later, I took an absent swig.

Reader, I drank them.

My first thought was that I had been poisoned. Also that I had swallowed a live wire and had been electrocuted. Also that I might go into some kind of allergic shock and die. They hurt, you see. They were barbed things, and they were in my throat, and they felt like iron filings and they tasted like aspirin. Though some of them were already down the hatch, I ran to the bathroom and started spitting them out, while at the same time trying to determine how many I had swallowed. I spat into the sink, and the spittle was not just flecked brown, it was marbled red. I had ants in my mouth, and my tongue was bleeding.

Now, I might have very well bit into my own tongue in a panic. But I wasn't taking any chances. My wife had been planning a renovation of our rotten house for a long time, and now I acceded to her wishes. A human swarm of contractors came, tearing off siding, depositing whole sides of the house in a dumpster. When I warned them of what they might find — the horror they might uncover — they smiled and said, "We spray." And so they did. Before they destroyed the house in order to save it, they poisoned the house in order to destroy it. The politicalization of this parable continues apace: I had let a problem persist because of a lack of better solutions, and now, like the federal government, I was trying to spend my way out of it, with an overarching agenda. And it worked: Though Mike Rust warns that the ants will be back, I haven't seen one inside the house since the repairs were completed in May. At about the same time, my daughter finished school, and I had a chance to read through the work she did in her kindergarten year. She goes to a progressive school, so I was not surprised when, on one page in her workbook, she was asked: "If you see an ant, do you squash it or not squash it?" I knew what they were getting at here; I knew how the school wanted her to answer, for it was the same way I'd wanted her to answer for all the years of our infestation. But things had changed. The ants had come and then they'd stayed, and I was neither surprised nor disappointed that she had written, with her childish handwriting and her clear-eyed view of nature, "Squash it."

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io