Ants

A battle against ants is set in my house, and what are we fighting for? The crickets!

This is a a small reflection how to deal with problems

Living in an old house on the bottom floor, I thought that these things just appears like this, some ants, one several hour.. I can survive. But when a cascade of ants running on the floor, on my laptop, on the cables and even on my legs I had to speak up -"why are you here Ants?!

I figurit out. They are waiting for my crickets to moult. Just as me. They strikes in the moment the cricket is most vulnerable and hit them! Kill them. Eat them up in pieces. And I, I am waiting for those tiny crickets to be a little bit more feed to give to the tarantulas. So instead I am feeding the ants! And got the anoying ant-pathways with them here.

First sign of the ants was just to make it clean everywhere and make it cleaner in the cricket house.

Next strategy was to try to take them out, one by one, as I thought; communicate with them- they are many and if I take them away they leave a little message on tha spot "I dissaperad in a mysterious way here, don't go".

That strategy seem to work for a while, but was energy consuming for me and it happens that some of the ants was trying to streghten the limits.

Now, that I realized that it was not the crickets food they wanted- it was the cricket itself. I just have to change methods. This time, reorganise everything; Crickets have to go from the house. I will give them to the tarantulas this day. Problem solved.

Why try to keep an unbalanced system in balance? Just too much cost in energy and also it give a sign of not seeing the problem's main sourse. Here's the cricket initself (not the ants), in our sociey i mostly think about the cars in this post (not the humans), it dosen't make anything better (sure maybe the air quality right on the spot) to have fuels from biomass och biogas, it is the presence of the cars that are the cause of so much things that we don't even see the connection.

While writing this post, I try to communicate with the ants let's say 20 times. But this time, they are to many so this don't work anymore. They don't listen, they got influenses from others that survived anyway, even if they didn't listening to the message "don't"..

Worth mentioning in a post about ant communication is the fiction book "The empire of ants" (orginal title Les Fourmis) from Bernad Werber, this book can give feed to another sense in our minds. He writes in another book;

They [the public in large] are going to go from surprise to surprise eventually leading to the extraordinary conclusion, which is based on a little known but nevertheless real scientific discovery

My personal inpiration source is Edward O Wilson, biologist and entomologist, who gave many insights to others and broadened the field of biology, especially with the theory of island biogeography. His book "The diversity of life" was read before my ecologist studies and was surely a unconscious way of putting me into the smallest interactions within microbial ecology, entomology and other small but very important interactions. I can, as you see, also drag it all the way to my interest of communication and environmental problems. Reading a little bit more about Wilson and can see that he also wrote an article about ants and are a so- called myrmecologist (myrmex-ant), what a coincidence! Things are more integrated than what it fist seems.

Wilson also wrote the book Success and Dominance in Ecosystems: The Case of the Social Insects available online (click).

And well, next time, crickets have to be in a very closed tank, in their own world. They should not do any more troubles here.