Tricksters of the arcane, devising clever experiments in the laboratory when in the mood, chroniclers of the elegant insight, travelers to seminars in Palo Alto and Heidelberg. I used to step on ants. It's a page-turner. Among ants, socialism works. As a result, proletarians of some 9,500 known species commit suicide and homicide to feed and protect their infant sisters.
Ants are neat, clean and often friendly.
They recognize a nest mate by smell. And when one ant meets another outside the nest, she strokes her sister's head with a foreleg, then shares the regurgitated contents of her jaws. If one encounters an enemy, however, she threatens the intruder by lifting her abdomen and opening her mouth to look formidable. Mr. Holldobler and Mr. Wilson advise that the best position for observing ants is prone. So some sunny afternoon around 5 o'clock, after it has rained and the air is still and wet, you can find me lying down in Central Park's Sheep Meadow, watching for the nuptial flights of the virgin queens of Lasius neoniger, those brown specks responsible for the miniature dirt craters on the baseball diamonds and picnic grounds.