What is This System Trying to Do?

When I went to bed on Wednesday night, I hoped I'd done enough to deal with an ant invasion into our home. I'd anticipated it. We live within the jurisdiction of a home owners association and periodically, when ant populations begin to surge, they lay down insecticide. Whenever they do this, within 30 minutes, the ants come inside.

Of course, they're escaping the tragedy and my home, being relatively poison free, is a sanctuary. Usually, they just mill around on the floor, but this time, one the scout ants, the ones whose role in ant society is to randomly search for sustenance, discovered the panty, and specifically the dog treats and a package of shelled pistachios that had not been fully resealed. 

I'm not a fan of swarms of ants inside my home, and especially in the pantry. Over my adult life, I've had to deal with ant invasions at least once a year and, to be honest, I've come to relish the challenge. It's always an opportunity to learn something new.

I've tried all kinds of things over the decades, but my current approach is to start with Windex. I emptied the pantry shelves, tossed the fully infested food, then took the rest outdoors where I would later wipe off any remaining ants. I then gave the swam, their trails, and their entry points a good dose of Windex. I wiped the slowed ants up with paper towels. This does a few things: the liquid slows them down, the surfactants in the product interferes with their respiration, and the cleaning product dissolves the all important pheromone trail.

Ants are what biologists call "superorganisms" in that they are both individual animals and parts of a larger organism. The "queen" is comparable to the reproductive organs, the workers function like the body's cells or tissue, and their pheromone communication system operates like a nervous system.

When I awoke yesterday, there were still a few lingering ants, but they seemed to be aimless -- just a few scouts randomly hunting. Often, if I'm diligent for an hour or so, I can finish the project one ant at a time until they've "forgotten" about the inside of my house entirely. But first I fed the dog, who then came over to see what I was doing and coughed up a "little something." I saw it, but I was busy with other things for about 30 minutes. When I returned, the ant swarm had also returned to this meaty mucus on the floor.

What had happened was that one of those scout ants had stumbled upon our dog's wee gift, found it interesting, tasted it, then returned to the rest of the ant-body all the while leaving a pheromone trail by way of remaining connected to this delicious morsel. Back in the colony, it regurgitated its bite so the others could confirm for themselves that, indeed, this just what they needed. Then it was "C'mon everybody!"

I often feel like the preschoolers I work with operate very much like a superorgansim. A child will come across something on the playground, like an ant trail. They'll stop to study it, to wonder about it, to experiment with it. Then they tell someone else about it. Before long you have a swarm of children. I've often referred to the "hive mind" of preschoolers who have been together for a while. 

Some ant species focus on sugars, some on protein/grease, and some on both depending on what the colony needs at the moment. I've often had good luck with maple syrup and borax traps (the workers carry sticky sweet grains of borax -- an ant toxin -- back to the colony), but I knew that wasn't going to do the trick this time, at least not all on its own. I'd already destroyed the pheromone connection to my pantry, but the ants were clearly trapped between the outdoor insecticides and me. And they needed another find a source of protein. I would need to consider other measures.

My approach to ant invasions is to observe, try to understand, then adjust the environment in order to make it possible to live as much as I can in harmony with them. In fact, I usually don't even use borax in my "traps." Often I just put a pool of syrup on a piece of aluminum foil and place it along their trail between the entry point and the food they're after. When the ants are seeking sugar, they very quickly abandon the more distant food for the more readily available syrup. I then, day-by-day, sometimes even hour-by-hour, shift the foil in order to redirect the flow of ants until I get them outdoors. I will then move them away from the house and leave the foil in the middle of the lawn for them to gorge upon. I can then clean up the pheromone trail and that's that.

I gave this new swarm the Windex treatment, but knew that I needed to get them going somewhere else. Among the foodstuffs I'd tossed out was an almost empty box of Milk Bones.  I dug it out of the trash. They were still swarming it, even though I know that these individual ants, despite plenty of food, were destined to die. Ants cannot survive for long without a connection to their colony, any more that a human cell can exist once disconnected from the whole. They can't start new colonies anymore than we can regenerate our arms and legs. They cannot join a different colony because their chemistry identifies them as part of a rival and marks them for death. They may have survived on those Milk Bones and other garbage for while, but left where they were, they were doomed.

I put the box of Milk Bones against a wall outside my home, closest to their main entry point. The ideas was to lure them to a new, perfectly acceptable food source outside my home. I dusted the crevices with a food-grade "soil" comprised of fossilized algae (diatomaceous earth, available at my local Ace Hardware). This isn't a poison, but rather a naturally occurring product that can remove the waxy protective coating on the exoskeletons of ants. It can kill them if it remains on their bodies for a few days, but they are actually amazing at cleaning it off themselves and one another (grooming). The main function of the soil is to make things uncomfortable which discourages all but the most determined scout ants.

This morning, knock on wood, I see no ants indoors. Surprisingly, a check of the outdoor Milk Bones that had once been swarming with ants, was today completely ant free, so much so that I'm going to let the dog decide if they're still edible . . . I think I know the answer to that one! But I don't know the answer to my most pressing question: Where did the ants go?

I mean, they must have found a better/closer food source that does not involve my pantry and avoids the poison.

I regret that my process killed some ants. I am more upset, however, with the HOA and its insecticide program. Ants are not my enemy. They were simply escaping a habitat that was rendered suddenly, and ham-fistedly, inhospitable. That said, I didn't want them in my food or my house. 

This week I've written a couple of posts about earth systems (here and here) and how we're part of those systems. What I see when I slow down and study these ants, is a system, or a part of a system, revealing itself. I tried to approach this "problem" the way I approach my work with young children, which is to say, when things aren't going as expected, it's my opportunity to learn. These ants have given me a live demonstration of emergence, adaptation, and collective intelligence, which is what happens whenever we slow down and consider that we exist as systems within systems. The whole of evolution is systems adapting to one another as part of greater systems.

When we see the world this way, we learn to approach challenges with the question: What is this system trying to do? We can only answer this question through close observation, experiment, and patience. Then once we understand, our interventions can become specific, smaller, more elegant, and usually far more effective than if we, you know, just lay down a bunch of poison.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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