The Glorious Empire of Ants

Ants are among the most social organisms on earth, that much is well-known. We don't have any idea just how organized they are.

Consider these facts:

• In the Amazon rain forest, one hectare of soil contains more than eight million ants.
• Ants make up 10 to 15 percent of the entire animal biomass in most terrestrial environments.
• Ants have been found to thrive in such inhospitable regions as Death Valley and Antarctica.
• Using dozens of pheromone (chemical scent) secretions, ants communicate in a surprisingly sophisticated language.
• Ants are resistant to hard radiation.
• An ant colony can be considered a super-organism, with individual ants the rough approximation of cells.
• A single colony, such as the Formica yessensis supercolony on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido, can contain as many as 306 million workers and one million queens living in 45,000 interconnected nests.

It should not surprise anyone that recent studies indicate ants are not only cognizant of human affairs, but participate actively in them. A recently unclassified CIA document reports that 25% of hostile corporate takeovers in America are paid for by ants. Even more shocking is the revelation that much of the world's weapons-grade plutonium production in the past three decades was funded by ants.

Most biologists refute the claims of a conspiracy masterminded by social insects, but how are we to explain last year's drive-by shooting assassination of Oswald H. Larvey, one-time Senior Investigator for the CIA and leading expert on covert ant affairs? His research in ant supercolonies has provided us with rare photographic evidence of the Ants' intent to usurp our civilization, such as the stockpiles of ammunition found in colonies on Africa's Ivory Coast. And how are we to shrug off the fact that the 1994 Middle East Peace Conference in Turkey was postponed indefinitely when thousands of ants poured out of the briefcases of top officials? Why has the White House budget for insect pest control tripled since last year?

As ants innocently scamper across our sidewalks, few of us stop to think that our destruction may be germinating deep under our homes and streets. But the numbers are overwhelmingly in favor of ants. They are in our offices and our kitchen cupboards, observing us and waiting.