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Ants


I have been thinking a lot about ants recently. Not that strange when you understand how many there are in Singapore. Ants are everywhere. They are amazing creatrues; I'm sure a lot of you have heard me say this before given that I spent two weeks studying leafcutter ants on a peninsula in Southern Spain 10 years ago.

Anyway, I digress. People tend to largely ignore ants here, but they come in all sorts of fascinating shapes, colours and sizes. Nobody really says much about them, but they are everywhere. My manager even had to decontaminate my desk because there was a nest of them inside the woodwork somewhere!

I have a problem with the ants over here. They are viscious blighters. All I have to do is stand innocently preparing a meal in our kitchen and I will invariably get a munch on the ankle. It's like they think they own the place or something. They are a nightmare.

One day I was walking along on my handphone giving grief to some poor customer service representative and bang; a massive red ant jumps out of a tree and takes a chunk out of my shoulder. This, to me, is not proper ant behaviour. They should just get on with what they are best at i.e. finding the smallest scrap of food and moving in en masse to destroy or move it. Carrying items several times their own body size, and all that ant stuff. They should leave the business of biting people to the slightly more evil insects such as mosquitoes and wasps.

Ants: know your place.

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