The ants we've murdered

Liam: Tyler, we learned a lot about ants in our interview (with the ant). And so I've been doing some thinking about my own personal interactions with ants in my life. I gotta say I've probably killed a lot of them. I don't feel great about it since in the interview we learned from the ant that generally it's a bit of a drag for the ant community to always be dealing with horrific mass murders. At this point I know that I shouldn't kill them so I only do it in situations where it's clear that it's him or me. But when I little kid I think I probably murdered ants for no good reason at all and gosh I just feel rotten about it. Do you have similar skeletons in your closet?

Tyler: I do Liam, and it looks like they're exoskeletons.

After our interview with an actual ant who can speak English, I was thinking about my career kill record against ants, and I'm batting a thousand. Like I've probably murdered hundreds upon hundreds of ants in my lifetime without even thinking about it. Whether it was pouring boiling water into an ant hill or setting a bowl of them on fire as kid, or setting death traps for them in my home as an adult, I am pretty much the Hitler of the ant kingdom.

It's weird because now that we have heard from an ant, who was definitely not me, I think I feel a bit of ant-hill-boiler's remorse. Was I a total sociopath as a child? It appears so. On the other hand, ants are creepy as shit. You've seen these things - the antennae, the beady eyes, the little legs, their strange butts - god I just want to kill every ant that I see. I'm so conflicted, I can see why Hitler killed himself.

Liam: I'm somewhat reluctant to even talk about the horrible things I did to ants as a child because it makes me sound like I was honing the skill-set and psyche of a serial killer. One thing I'll mention, though, is dripping molten hot candle wax onto ants as they went about their business. This would have a sort of 'Han Solo frozen in carbonite' effect except I'm pretty sure the ants just died immediately.

I can't even imagine how other ants would have handled this news... maybe something like "what the fuck? are you serious? why? WHYYYY?"

And who can blame them. I, like you, have probably killed hundreds if not thousands of ants in my life. But like you said, ants are fucked up. I'm pretty sure that I've heard about armies of ants killing human babies in like Africa or some place like that. Maybe it was lions... no, I think ants. So maybe we're just doing our part?

Tyler: I just searched "can ants kill people" and according to the news site Google, they kill up to 30 humans per year. This is insane! Imagine knowing just one person who was murdered by a herd of ants. It would be so embarassing. "Yo how's your friend Dave doing" ... "Oh yeah Dave, he was killed by an ant army. We didn't even give him a funeral." Think of how selfish you'd have to be to get killed by ants, knowing the humiliation that would consume your friends and family.

Liam I don't think you have to feel bad about what you did to ants as a kid because A) it was the 90s, we were all on meth, and B) we now know they crave the taste of human blood. This is fact now henceforth until we find another ant that talks.

You ever eaten an ant?

Liam: Not on purpose but it's probably happened.

30 people a year. Jesus Christ. That makes ants one of our few natural predators, it seems. But yeah getting killed by ants is sooo embarrassing. How can you let that happen? Up until the very moment of death you've gotta be saying "let's just see where they're going with this" and then you're dead. Seeing an army of ants carrying a severed human head back to their queen has gotta be quite a sight. I assume that's what happens after every kill.

You ever been bitten by one?

Tyler: I don't know but I wouldn't put it past them to have bitten my supple skin. I haven't bitten any of them so that would be wack.

I've been thinking all afternoon now about how much ant murder I have committed and it's weighing on me. Why do we find it so acceptable to kill ants and wear their skin as clothing? Or just kill them and not wear their skin, if that's not your thing? 

Liam: Wait what? Do you wear ant skin?

Tyler: No definitely not. Lol  can you imagine though

Liam: Yeah... right ok good. I don't do that either lol. Btw, are termites ants or what? What about spiders

Tyler: Well shit, I've never thought about that. If spiders are ants then I've killed a whole lot more ants than I thought. We should revisit this at some point.

I want to go back and ask about the wax thing - was that your most creative ant killing? I admitted to dumping boiling water and literal fire on them so I'd like to know what kind of guy I'm dealing with here.

Liam: Yeah I'd say wax for sure was my most creative kill. I mean don't get me wrong I tried fire too. And water. And of course, the magnifying glass (which I always thought was really hard given how ants generally ran away from the light beam in order to not die). I feel like sometimes water didn't even phase ants. If it did rain would be a disaster for them. I guess that's why you used boiling water. That's pretty fucked up and good.

By the way, I just googled "funnest way to kill ants" and apparently it's a common search. Get a load of this video.

This kid is a real psycho.

"no wonder our cavemen ancestors were so smart" hahahaa

Tyler: Hahahahahahaha

Yeah I'd have to wait for a time when my mom wasn't around so I could use the stove and boil the water. Then I'd find an ant hill and pour it down there while screaming something like "I FUCKING HATE ANTS"

Liam: It's funny... I don't remember targeting any other creature the way that you and I seem to have targeted ants. I got stung in the ear by a bee when I was like 8 and it scarred me for life so I don't fuck with bees. But ants just fucking had to die. Good god I hope that ant we interviewed doesn't read this shit. 

Tyler: Part of it is that they don't fly I think. So they're just right THERE, you know? I would love to kill like a thousand flies because I hate them so much but when was the last time you saw two flies? It's always way easier to find a whole bunch of ants and then trick them into crawling into your death camp that you made out of Legos and doused with lighter fluid waiting to be set ablaze.

Liam: Well I think we learned a lot about each other here and very little about ants. And that's what it's all about. We are great.

Antland exclusive: The Interview

Today the Antland team is proud to present to you the first ever interview with an ant.

We give you... The Interview With An Ant

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Antland: Hello Mr. Ant. How are you? You probably don't like to be called Mr. Ant. What should I call you, ant?

Ant: I don't know Mr human do you like being called that?

Antland: Hmm I guess now that you mention it I do because it makes me the face of my species, a position I have long desired. What do you think of Atland,  Grantland for ants?

 Ant: I first heard about it when I was contacted for this interview and I thought "uhhggg, fucking finally. Finally a site for ants." So I was both excited and humbled that this is happening. I don't really get if it's pro-ants or anti-ants but I mean shit, we'll take what we can get. I can lift 50 times my own weight but if nobody is writing about it then who the shit cares.
 

Antland: Well that's thing. We don't know if it's pro ant or ANTi ant either (haha). We know nothing about you. In school we are taught to fear you, but in church we are taught to worship you. We'd love to really get inside your head. What makes you tick? What motivates an ant like you? What song are you currently playing on repeat?

 

Ant:  Please don't mention ticks. currently I'm really just listening to anything ASAP crew but I mean I like to mellow out with some This will Destroy You or something similar when im at ant work. Been sprinkling in some Replacements now and then because you really can't go wrong with them, as you know.

 

As far as motivation goes, really I just want to get some ant ass. it sounds typical, I know, but that's what it's all about. You put in work and we ants typically work 19, 20 hour days, so there's a lot of pent up frustration. I wanna meet some girl ants, ya dig. 

Oh and money.

Antland: This is great. I'm learning so much. I actually recently saw a photograph of a very hot ant that I wanted to fuck. How does that make you feel? Also, you mentioned work.. What exactly do you do?

Ant: I hear you on that, because we ants find some of your kind very attractive. Jane fonda, the dad from Alf, Home Alone 2's Tim Curry (ants are into older humans because we don't reach sexual maturity until our 70s).

Our work can be very demanding but it's basically just picking up shit and moving it to wherever the queen ant says to. I mean at least I think there's a queen ant, but maybe that's just bees. 

Antland: Are you telling me ants live more than 70 years? Now that is just incredible. 70 plus years of carrying around shit for the queen sounds to me like a rough ride. Maybe you guys are actually relieved when some human child decides to dump a bucket of water onto one of your colonies! Or are those situations indescribably horrific?

Ant: Ants can live up to 130 years, that is simply a fact. Our healthcare system is so good that some ants literally just kill themselves after awhile because they are so bored. It's like "geez enough already." This is all true.

So yeah the disaster shit brought on by solely by humans. Sort of horrific. We honestly laugh at the thought of 9/11 because that was like one of your worst catastrophes as a race losing 3,000 lives but what you don't know is that 160,000 ants died that day too. Nobody fucking mentions this. Two gigantic buildings came crashing down in the middle of one of the world's biggest cities... uh yeah a couple of ants might have been killed too, big shots.

We have 9/11's every day in schoolyards, people's lawns, you name it. Kids just running over and peeing into an ant hill of like 10,000 ants. Bam, dead. Drowned in human piss. Where's wolf Blitzer on this one. He fucking Giraldo, that's where, in their pristine ant-less loft.

Wind, floods, you name it. The worst horror you can imagine. And magnifying glasses, dont get me started. Picture just being at work naked, as ants are, minding your own business when the fucking sun turns 38,000 times as hot and starts melting coworkers into liquid nothing as their screams are subdued as suddenly as the terror sets in. That's every day homie. Ant life expectancy would be like 300 years if it weren't for you people.

Antland: Ok listen. Let's not get into a big game of "who vaporized who with a magnifying glass" or "who drowned who in human piss." I think we can both agree that this kinda thing can go both ways and frankly you're sounding a bit bitter and it's unbecoming.

Let's cut the crap. Humans and ants have had a rocky relationship since the dawn of time. What makes this interview so monumental is that it offers us an opportunity to hash these things out. We need to establish what we can offer each other in some sort of mutually beneficial relationship. What do ants bring to the table?

Ant: A picnic table?

Antland: Sure. A Picnic table.

Ant: Alright sweet we love picnic tables. Wait do humans not like it when we join picnics

Antland: Well we don't love it. You do this thing where you take our food and sometimes you climb over us and shit. How would you like it? 

Ant: Ah ok i'm starting to connect the dots now. This makes sense when I stop to think about it. Considering this is the first ant/human interview - a groundbreaking thing really, this should be worldwide news when you think about it - we might not have realized we weren't welcome to your picnics.

Also another thing i'm realizing is that when we do this it creates some more 9/11's for us because a lot of times you guys just stomp and kill us in a truly horrifying manner. Ok yeah this is definitely a breakthrough. i'll see if I can spread the word and maybe stop this? FYI this will be difficult because there are many of us.

 

Antland: Well that's good I think we'd made some real headway here. Just a couple of final things here before I let you go.

One thing I was curious about was just the general feeling towards humans. I have mentioned that humans have complex feelings about ants, what with the fearing and also wanting to fuck them (and now that I say that I remember that you also want to fuck some of us also). Do ants generally like people in spite of us often murdering your kind by the thousands? You seem relatively up to date with our pop culture. Any humans that ants really revere or loathe? You have any ant projects coming out soon that you want to plug?

 

Ant: we don't really like you, no. A lot of that I think can be attributed to general misunderstanding but also a huge part of it is the killing. I think it's lame how sometimes you invite us into your home in the form of poor insulation and food crumbs, and then you trick us with poison and kill off an entire colony. Sadistic behavior.

But yeah the human we hate the most is god. Coming in second? You guessed it, Woody Allen. You make a movie called Antz (with a "z" at the end, fuck you) and have the lead hero be voiced by a child molester. Our fave human would probably be Tim Curry.

Nothing to plug except don't see the movie Antz, and I thank you for having me.

 Antland: Thank you for your time.

 

WELCOME TO ANTLAND

Ants. They're everywhere yet we know almost nothing about them. Scientists have been studying ants almost exclusively for eons yet they can't tell us a thing about them because they are idiots.

Enter: Antland. 

Simply put, it's a game changer. We are here to unlock all of the mysteries that these ghastly monsters may be hiding behind their chainsaw faces.

It's no secret that humans fear ants more than any other creature. I've heard, anecdotally, that a human baby is more genetically predisposed to recognize the scent or sound of an ant than to know its own mother's voice. I can't confirm this but it sounds like one of those things you hear that is definitely true. But are these horrible bugs (or are they insects? as of writing this we simply can't know but that's the kind of thing we will find out) all bad, or is there some untapped potential for good?

I can hear you already. "What do you mean?" you are asking, naively. Well, look no further than the classic American theatre production Jurassic Park. Maybe you remember how the whole dinosaur cloning schtick began. Those idiot scientists found some of that good, sweet dino DNA in what kind of bug? A mosquito. But it could have been an ant. In fact, things probably would have gone a lot smoother if they used an ant instead. Maybe think of that one next time, science boy.

There's no telling what the benefits of bridging the gap between our two species may be. As of right now, Antland will begin laying the groundwork for that bridge.

So on that note: welcome .... to Jurassic Park, for ants. Wait what