We Lost to Ants

The kids didn’t believe me when I told them about how humans lost to ants. I couldn’t blame them. Second-graders had been taught enough to know that humans originally came from Earth, but I knew from parent meetings that many weren’t comfortable talking about humanity’s greatest defeat. It was up to us teachers.

One boy snorted in the middle of class. “That’s crazy. We have machines and rockets and stuff. People flew all the way to Mars.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I said. “Because there are no ants on Mars.”

“I’ve seen ants,” another girl said. “They’re super small.”

“It doesn’t matter how small they are,” I told the class. I clicked the remote in my hand and brought up the holograms. Ants may have been part of the past, but the past was still remembered. “Ants are eusocial insects, like the honey bees in Dr Pulrich’s lab. That means they cooperate with each other to perform tasks that a single ant couldn’t.”

I put up an image of Atta cephalotes, a species of leaf cutter ants, trimming the leaves off of trees to fertilise their fungus farms. I clicked again, and there was a picture of a type of Myrmecocystus, or “honeypot ants,” a genus of ants that stored sugary fluids in their own bodies like tankards.

Finally, the hologram came to a 3D model of a Linepithema humile colony. Tunnels like tentacles spiralled down with easily over a hundred tiny chambers. A city in its own right.

“The Argentine ant,” I said to the children. “At the turn of the 21st century, scientists discovered a supercolony of these ants that had spread all across the European coast without us noticing.”

I gave them a map of Earth with red lines drawing where the supercolonies had spread to. One in Argentina, two in North America—one for each coast— another covering all of Oceana, with smaller ones dotted around.

“And when we finally noticed,” I continued, “it was too late. Scientists aren’t sure exactly when the ants woke up, though the best guess is somewhere in the mid-21st century.”

“What do you mean they woke up?”

“Well, just like our brains,” I explained, “or the first true AI, the ants had reached critical mass and became aware. By the 22nd century, the supercolonies had united into a single, worldwide brain of a million billion ants, and Earth simply became too small for humans and ants.”

That was too much for them. They groaned “no” and accused me of being ridiculous. Children, despite their wild imaginations, could be very rational. But I had to teach them. They needed to learn about ants.

More importantly, they needed to learn why they couldn’t win.

“Oh, you don’t believe me?” I asked them. “Luckily for all of us, I have a very special guest for today’s special lesson.”

I clicked the remote in my hand and switched the hologram from an image display to a live feed from a satellite orbiting Earth. It was passing over the landmass formerly known as the continental United States. From sea to shining sea, there was one clear message formed by an uncountable mass of ants.

EARTH IS OURS. DO NOT COME BACK.

The class paused, their laughter at me silenced.

“The whole world?” one girl finally mumbled, still staring at the feed.

“That’s right class,” I said, remembering how I felt when I first found out. “The whole world lost to ants.”