The irony is, I knew where some ants were: in my office. They live in one of the electrical outlets. I see them going in there all day long. I think maybe they’re eating electrons, which makes me nervous. I seriously considered capturing one of the office ants and carrying it out to the science experiment, and if necessary giving it broad hints about what to do (“Yum! Snickers! “). But I was concerned that if I did this, the ants might become dependent on me, and every time they got hungry they’d crawl onto my desk and threaten to give me electrical stings if I didn’t carry them to a snack.
Fortunately, some real outdoor ants finally discovered our experiment, and we were able to observe their behavior at close range. I had been led to believe, by countless public-television nature shows, that ants are very organized, with the colony divided into specialized jobs such as drones, workers, fighters, bakers, consultants, etc., all working together with high-efficiency precision. But the ants that showed up at our experiment were total morons. You’d watch one, and it would sprint up to a Cocoa Krispie, then stop suddenly, as if saying: “Yikes! Compared with me, this Cocoa Krispie is the size of a Buick!” Then it would sprint off in a random direction. Sometimes it would sprint back; sometimes it would sprint to another Cocoa Krispie and act surprised again. But it never seemed to do anything. There were thousands of ants behaving this way, and every single time two of them met, they’d both stop and exchange “high-fives” with their antennas, along with, I assume, some kind of ant pleasantries (“Hi Bob!” “No, I’m Bill!” “Sorry! You look just like Bob!”). This was repeated millions of times. I watched these ants for two days, and they accomplished nothing. It was exactly like highway construction. It wouldn’t have surprised me if some ants started waving orange flags to direct other insects around the area.