These little ants, I’m telling you! They farm and I love it.
The little ants I’m telling you about are leafcutter ants. They live underneath dirt. They have gardens down there, and in the gardens, they have rich, wet air. They eat the fungus they grow there.
They carry things to and from the garden. It’s a built environment. The ants built it. It’s so small, which is maybe what makes it darling to me. So small in the sense that the garden is the size of my hand or my foot, just one small part of me. Me, impressed in a condescending way. And so sincerely delighted at a kinship. But it’s not about me.
They clip pieces of leaves and bring them inside. Carefully they’ve clipped from plants with their own mouths. Inside, they clip them smaller, a new team of smaller ants. The entomologists are saying what they see. I’m learning about it on Wikipedia, and then on websites that make science news accessible to the general population, and then in peer-reviewed papers, because someone told me they thought I might be interested in these ants. The ants are getting progressively smaller. With each step in the process, there is a new smaller-than-the-last team of ants. After the indoor maceration, the new smaller ants knead the macerated material. They knead with their feet.
The ants are making pellets for the garden floor. Once they are finished, it will be called prill. According to Oxford Languages, prill is something else, and then it becomes prill “after congealment during an industrial process.” The ants are together, behaving as an industrial process. What is industrial about them? This is not so clear to me. Maybe it’s that we can see an end product. They are making something, and they have a process with an endpoint.
And then, after the kneading: their own poop. Their fecal fluid is key to this process. I am curious about what makes fecal fluid fecal fluid. Is any fluid that comes out of the anus fecal? Could I, in passing through the ant’s anus, become fecal? I want to congeal. As I write, an impossibility emerges: it’s not about me. As I read, I see: the new smaller ants stomp and defecate and stomp and defecate. They do this elegantly, earnestly: I am taken with their expertise. As I read, I see: the entomologists are taken with the ants’ expertise, even as they are taken with their own expertise.
The scientific language feels swollen with qualification. I keep seeing the word behaviors. This is true: the ants have behaviors. We say behavior, and the ants behave and behave. Inside their animal category, they are behaving. The entomologists are taken with the ants’ expertise, just as they are taken with their own expertise. The entomologists are so committed to making it not about them that they become overpresent.
What I’m saying is: there’s a real reluctance to call what these ants are doing agriculture. To say: that’s farming, they’re farming! To say simply: they’re growing food; they’ll eat it later. This is a reluctance to share language with the ants. To describe our lives as we do the ants’. We say about ourselves: industry, innovation. We are overpresent in the surprise, the delight that hinges on surprise: that the ants could do something like farming, that they could do something like humans, like what humans call farming.
And here I am, surprised, looking at the photos on Wikipedia, and then on AntWiki. In the photos, the ants are walking, holding cut green leaves in almost-moon shapes: I see crescents with one point blunted, semicircles that wouldn’t quite make a circle when doubled. I see reaching movements, giving a bustling appearance. In the photos, the ants are crawling over and through luminous tufts of fungus, the tunnels and caves in the growth. They look busy. In the photos, the ants are industrious.
In the photos, the ants are smaller than the leaves they are cutting. In the photos, the ants are the same size as each other. Their size allows for many ants to be in a photo of one leaf. Their size would allow for many ants to be crushed easily under one of my hands. I balk a little imagining the textures, then remedy my image: there would be a napkin, something, between me and the ants, or between me and the crushing.
In the photos, the scientific hand feels huge. In the nineteenth century, the camera had just entered science, and biologists were photographing life much smaller than their bodies. They were so excited about this. They wanted to be so close to their small bodies, and they were anticipating this closeness as an achievement.
In their excitement they decided: we want the purest image. Maybe they decided they wanted purity before they got excited. Either way, they decided: what is more pure than the humanless? They got excited, and they decided on a set of absurd contortions. They decided: we will remove ourselves from the process of drawing our pictures. They decided: we will not be involved as the camera takes its photo of the specimen.
Of course one must use one’s body’s hand to hold the drawing instrument, to make marks, to set up the shot. Of course one must move one’s eyes back and forth between the subject and the paper. Of course one must bend and move one’s eyes to look at what the camera will capture, for framing. These remain, cloyingly, interactions between bodies.
Years after I do all this reading, I go see the leafcutter ants at the American Museum of Natural History. I watch the ants move for a long time, look at the sizes of their bodies and the sizes of the leaves in their mouths, the sizes of the leaves around them. I notice several ants crawling on the white plastic outside of their contained habitat. They have become, newly, a kind of pest in the controlled habitat of the museum. I want to know how and where they had gotten out. I want to know the point at which their contained ant space is continuous with my museum space. I want to know if that point is big enough for me to stick a finger through. The ants on the habitat are walking in the same direction as the ants in the habitat.
I feel so close to them because they are only a couple of inches away from me. I feel very far away from them, too, on the other side of their built habitat made mostly of clear plastic. I take lots of photos on my phone.
