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WAR! UNH! Good god, y'all....
Jun. 2nd, 2004 02:40 pmMy porch is covered in the bodies of fallen warriors.
Yesterday, when I went outside on my porch around 2pm or so, I noticed that the funky green astroturf rugs were littered with black...things. At first glance, I thought I was looking at some kind of dirt or debris blown up on the porch overnight by wind, as it had been half-assedly storming--but no! On closer inspection, I realized that the black, crunchy specks were...ANTS! Big black carpenter ants. Hundreds of them. All dead as doornails and lying in various stages of disarray and dismemberment on my astroturf.
What could've caused this holocaust? I wondered. Perhaps my mother had sprayed the porch with Raid or something....So I asked--but she hadn't. She was as surprised by the sudden appearance of a million dead ants as I was. Well...what the hell caused this massive die-off, then? I bent down closer to look, noticing a few black ants still moving like normal amid the carnage. They just seemed to be stumbling around aimlessly, shellshocked, until I witnessed two of them meet up and immediately begin tearing one another to shreds with their huge, Alien-esque mandibles!
After a little more study, I deduced that--apparently--two unrelated colonies of carpenter ants have decided to make my porch their home or scavenging grounds...and the massacre I was observing was nothing more than the inevitable clash between competing ant countries. Even though I can't tell either side apart, I have dubbed one ant nation the Bushites, and the other the Al-Qaedists. Neither side really seems to be winning--at least, as far as I can tell--and the body count is mounting steadily. I sincerely hope the queens on both sides are busily churning out warrior eggs, because this conflict looks like it may go on for-fucking-ever.
In the meantime I have to sweep the battlefields every few hours to scour away the unsightly bodies and present the combatants with a fresh playing field...and I keep wondering when the aliens are going to show up and do the same for our planet.
Yesterday, when I went outside on my porch around 2pm or so, I noticed that the funky green astroturf rugs were littered with black...things. At first glance, I thought I was looking at some kind of dirt or debris blown up on the porch overnight by wind, as it had been half-assedly storming--but no! On closer inspection, I realized that the black, crunchy specks were...ANTS! Big black carpenter ants. Hundreds of them. All dead as doornails and lying in various stages of disarray and dismemberment on my astroturf.
What could've caused this holocaust? I wondered. Perhaps my mother had sprayed the porch with Raid or something....So I asked--but she hadn't. She was as surprised by the sudden appearance of a million dead ants as I was. Well...what the hell caused this massive die-off, then? I bent down closer to look, noticing a few black ants still moving like normal amid the carnage. They just seemed to be stumbling around aimlessly, shellshocked, until I witnessed two of them meet up and immediately begin tearing one another to shreds with their huge, Alien-esque mandibles!
After a little more study, I deduced that--apparently--two unrelated colonies of carpenter ants have decided to make my porch their home or scavenging grounds...and the massacre I was observing was nothing more than the inevitable clash between competing ant countries. Even though I can't tell either side apart, I have dubbed one ant nation the Bushites, and the other the Al-Qaedists. Neither side really seems to be winning--at least, as far as I can tell--and the body count is mounting steadily. I sincerely hope the queens on both sides are busily churning out warrior eggs, because this conflict looks like it may go on for-fucking-ever.
In the meantime I have to sweep the battlefields every few hours to scour away the unsightly bodies and present the combatants with a fresh playing field...and I keep wondering when the aliens are going to show up and do the same for our planet.
