A. Colucci - The Colony

Jane and Derek ambled over to the worksite.

Derek stood six feet tall with a long blond ponytail, scuba pants, no shirt and a flawless tan that smelled of coconut; a surfer dude even in the desert. “Hey, Professor Hart,” he said with a sleepy drawl, squinting at her enlarged sunglasses. “You’re starting to look like a bug.”

“Ha-ha,” replied Kendra. “Did you get a corpse count?”

“Bloody well did,” quipped Jane, an exchange student from England. “Fifty-seven queens.” She held out a Styrofoam cup full of ants.

For Kendra, the exhilaration of finding so many dead queens was overshadowed by the insects piled inside a cheap coffin that appeared to have orange juice stains.

“You dumped them in a cup?” Kendra asked.

Jane shrugged. “Sorry. Should we say a few words then?”

“Back to business,” Kendra said brusquely.

Ants were already busy at work. It was well past five-thirty reveille when the first workers emerged from holes like children at recess. They were called foragers, small reddish ants that were marking trails and heading back to the nest with news of crackers that Derek had sprinkled before sunrise.

“Man, I don’t get it.” Derek scratched his head. “Why are they so hard to kill?”

“Ants have been around for a hundred million years,” replied Kendra. “They’re not going anywhere.”

“Hundred million years?” Derek asked. “That’s like—almost as long as people.”

Kendra frowned at her student’s paltry knowledge of basic evolution.

“So what’s the secret to their success?” Kate asked.

“No males,” Kendra answered.

“Huh?” Derek scratched his head again.

“Ant colonies. They’re all female,” she told him. “The male lives a couple weeks, does his thing… dead.”

Derek squinted for a moment and then chuckled. “Yeah, right.”

Jane slapped sand from her hands. “I still say we poison them all. Throw some god-awful pesticide on the whole bloody lot.”

Kendra seized a black spray can. “You mean like this stuff?”

“Perfect.”

A white mist erupted as Kendra sprayed a cloud of ant repellant toward her students and they scattered like bugs.

“Unless you directly target every queen, they’ll react the same as you. A million fleeing ants, carrying their eggs and larvae through a hundred miles of tunnel.” She threw them each a bottle of water and grinned, like a mother teaching her children the hard way not to stick fingers into electrical sockets. “Either that or they’ll split into multiple colonies.”

“You could have just said that,” Jane said, spitting bitter particles from her lips.

“Haven’t you been paying attention? Pesticides don’t work. The entire world has been hypnotized by a handful of billion-dollar companies that have made nature one big science experiment and human beings their guinea pigs.” Kendra’s voice rose like a Baptist preacher’s. “The same people selling the world’s precious seed supply are conveniently selling all the pesticides as well and genetically mutating our plants into toxic, allergenic pseudo-food in an attempt to make them bug resistant. We’re busting our asses out here trying to break the cycle of a chemical dependency.”

“Is that gonna be on the test?” Derek asked.

Kendra sighed heavily. “I’ve spent years trying to wipe these suckers out. Best team of entomologists ever assembled. Guess how many colonies we killed?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “ Zero. ”

“We’ve wiped out eleven in four months,” beamed Kate.

“Exactly. We might have finally found the answer to a hundred-year-old problem.” She threw Kate a bottle of yellow liquid. “So let’s move it.”

Kendra watched her students get back to business with little enthusiasm and she sighed. They could never understand the magnitude of what had been accomplished. There had never been a chemical to stop the spread of fire ants or any other ant species. Theoretically, if her formula succeeded in wiping out ants, it could potentially control other insect populations as well. Over time that could mean millions of dollars to her company, Invicta, as well as the university that supported her studies. Not that the money mattered to Kendra. Each year fire ants damaged millions of crops and caused thousands of injuries and even deaths to people and farm animals. Since the 1940s, fire ants had spread across the United States as far north as Virginia and, due to their rapid adaptation and global warming, it was estimated they would reach as high as New England by 2020. Wiping out their population was her only motivation. Early tests were positive but not definitive. There were too many variables, but still, Kendra felt more optimistic than at any other time in her life.

She sat down in the sand and observed her students. Kate stood over the fire ant mound and removed the stopper from the pheromone solution. Derek handed her two long cotton swabs and she dipped them into the bottle. Together they began dabbing the liquid onto the thoraxes of ants headed back to the nest. Then Kate used the top of a dropper bottle to suck up six grams of solution, squirt the contents into an ant hole and set off to treat the other mounds.

Kendra threw a nod to Jane. “I see you left the shorts home. How many bites total?”

“Eighteen. All the way up to me bum.”

She stirred up a newly erupted anthill. “You have to admit, aside from being a nuisance they’re utterly amazing.”

“I guess.”

“Their social networking system makes Twitter and Facebook look like a joke.”

Jane chuckled.

“The perfect society, really.” Kendra picked up a single ant with a pencil tip and watched it crawl across the wood. “They work for the good of the colony, never for themselves. So affable and serene—at the same time, dogged and terrifying.”

“Terrifying?”

“Formica sanguinea?” Kendra blurted, as if it were obvious.

“Oh, yes,” Jane nodded. “I do so love the really nasty ones.”

Kendra tried to impress upon her students that ants were not the helpless creatures they appeared underfoot. They acted purely on instinct to secure the survival of the colony—and often in heinous ways. Formica Sanguinea, the slave maker ant, was a favorite example. After the queen mates, she plays dead and is dragged to another colony by her own soldiers. She kills the enemy queen and rolls around in her scent to confuse the colony. After this deadly act of assassination and impersonation, she takes the workers as slaves and begins laying her eggs. As her own brood matures, they emerge to attack other colonies, tearing their enemies apart limb by limb and scurrying off with thousands of eggs to be made into new slaves.

“That’s why we’re so fortunate,” said Kendra, holding the pencil at eye level as the ant crawled across the horizon. “We can study them up close. Understand their uniqueness. Most people think an ant is an ant.”

Jane raised a brow. “I think you need to get out more, Professor.”

The two women laughed together.

“Hey!” Kate shouted to the others. “Take a look.”

Kendra sprang to her feet, dusting off sand, and headed to the anthill beside Kate. A few of the worker ants were tearing one another apart. She grinned and let out a breath of relief.

Another positive test.

In a few hours, she predicted, the colony would be dead.

By 9:00 A.M. the scorching heat had sent most of the colony into their tunnels. Blotches of sweat covered the front of Kendra’s jumpsuit like a Rorschach test. Kate was counting ants, while Derek and Jane were sprawled out in the shade.

The hum of an engine in the distance perked up their ears. It grew louder, and then a black all-terrain vehicle flew over a sand dune, straight for the worksite. Dust spun in its wheels as it swiveled to a stop by the yellow Jeep.