Haji Ants

By Chuck Michael

9/22/03

I am sitting on my porch at Camp Speicher, an Army airfield in the Iraqi desert near Tikrit. The crumbs from my granola bar are on the move. Closer observation reveals a little black ant pushing on a piece of granola three times his size. He is working it like a D9 operator would a tree stump. Pushing, gunning the engine till it exhausts itself and the tracks started to spin in the soft earth, then backing out and going around the other end and shoving it from that direction. In an attempt to vent his frustration at the granola he hares out and about, running around in circles for 5 or ten seconds and then back at it. Another ant approaches and he sallies forth to chase him away. Deciding finally he isn’t getting anywhere, he tears off in the direction of his nest as fast as his 6 legs would carry him. I know because I follow him. He is incredibly fast. For his size and considering the terrain he has to negotiate, it is quite amazing; as fast as my normal walk. These fellas have minds of their own. They get out of your way when they see you coming. They travel alone and never form a chow line like regular ants at a picnic. About 5 minutes later here he comes back again, pushing and biting and pulling like the Little Ant That Could. A few minutes more and a bigger ant arrives which the little one doesn’t try to chase off. Can’t you just hear them at the nest. “SPIKE! Spike! I just stumbled across a gold mine. You are not going to believe the size of this food Man. It is like stupendous Spike, and it’s like too good to be true Man.!This is some sort of new-fangled man made energy bar stuff or something. Its like the Empire State Building or something Man. I can’t move it by myself. C’mon Spike. Lets go get it”.

“Yeah, yeah….I’ll be along in a few minutes. I got to finish stacking these fly eggs for the Queen’s banquet tonight. Here. Grab that last carcass over there and push the payload out of here. I’m a mess. How does she stomach this crap? I’ll be along after I get cleaned up”, says Spike.

“Sure Spike. I mean you smell like you’ve been rolling in someone else’s vomit to be honest. Gad! This stuff is yucky. This is what she eats? Or is this just what she feeds her boyfriends? Hey. Hurry up though Huh? Like we have to get back out there before those red ants from B Company find it. You know how they are. We’ll be all day fighting them. “ They double-team that lump of granola all the way back to their nest, which is about 100 feet away. They dispatch half a shelled peanut with the same determination. Figuring the scale to our size would work out to dragging 10,000 lbs for miles, I estimate. Maybe these are imported Egyptian pyramid builder ants that hitched a ride through the Red Sea on one of Moses’s camels. The Bible isn’t clear on this point but it is feasible that these guys are decendants of Pharos ant farm. Wouldn’t that be cool, the ant farm Pharo had when he was a kid and one morning before heading off to be worshiped he has a closer than usual look and notices little teeny tiny pyramids…Naaaahh! Occasionally one of these ants would stop long enough for me to observe her closely. Their rear ends stick up in the air at about a 45 degree angle which reminds me of a funny car. They are built like a fork lift rigged for the Daytona 500; like something out of the Monster Garage. Their legs are long and light compared to their stocky bodies. The rear legs are jointed in the middle like a deer, which I suppose gives them their mind boggling speed; reminds me of something George Lucas would dream up. Their mouth is surrounded by large mandibles. I have seen them grab something, lift it up and when they started to move, the top heaviness toppled them forward but they didn’t let go, rather turned upside down, still gripping the food verticaly, head down, swaying back and forth, 6 legs flailing, trying for control again, then take a few steps further and repeat the process all the way rolling and tumbling to the nest. It’s funny to watch because when it happens they are repeating their rolling and tumbling routine every couple of seconds or so. You can see her out there 70 feet away; a little black dot on the desert, somersaulting with her granola on her torturous path to the crib. These guys don’t build mounds. They just have a nest with multiple entrances-holes in the ground if you will. Truly, if they were our size, we wouldn’t be here. They are picky about their food also. As if they have a lot of choice in the Iraqi desert. They won’t eat dead flies I swatted, but rather grab them and look in the carcass for eggs. If they find none they drop it and continue on their everlasting egg hunt to the next one, and finding one with eggs, scurry off to their nest fast like lightening. You can’t see them for dust. Watching closely, its almost as if you can watch them making a decision and once made nothing deters the sprint to the nest. Bee line. No time wasted. I dumped a packet of sugar out on the ground. They haven’t taken an interest in it. Surprisingly, they avoid any water I spill in their vicinity. They will walk through it but I’ve never seen one of them paying much attention to it; which reinforces my Red Sea Theory. They are perfectly suited to their environment. They remind me of HoDaddy surfers that love the beach but hate the ocean of which in their environment, there is plenty of the former and absolutlely none of the latter. I crumbled a whole bar of granola for them, expecting to see the entire colony out there eventually. No, there were more ants gathering up the spoils but not many more. Seeing as how they are Hajji ants, maybe they are all Muslims and discourage women working outside of the home. For that matter they could be Amish, who generally feel the same way. No way they’re Baptists. Nevertheless, the next morning there was only one oversize crumb, which they were still sawing up. Given a choice, they seem to hunt around for the biggest piece they can carry at first before scrambling off. They know about power to weight efficiency. Like the song goes: “These guys ain’t dumb” I have a plywood porch supported by a 2 x 2 boards. Nooo. I know what you’re thinking. They didn’t try to carry off the porch. Once they decide on a piece worthy of their efforts off they go like some high school kid peelng out of the parking lot after school, fairly leaping off the porch’s edge rather than walking vertically down.” No time to waste. Got to get this back to the Queen so she can spawn more ants (or make her boyfriends eat it) and increase the size of the colony”; almost like they are awarded points for showing up with the most chow. Politically, I think they are Communists. Yes, it sometimes does get boring out here. .