Thinking - Multi-individual organisms (ants and so forth)

A while ago I wrote about the time I saw a cockroach die of old age. At the time it put me off killing things for a while because I was just about to kill it when it did the getting all dead thing. But...

Not long after that, I was sitting on the street in front of my workplace enjoying the smells of the traffic, and eating my lunch.

We didnt have a tree, and there was no other shade.

As the inevitable crumbs dropped to the ground, the ants started to wander around picking them up and taking them home presumably to feed their kids. I watched with exactly the amount of interest such things demand until I suddenly became slightly more excited.

!

An ant had decided to bite me.

And whats more, it too was taking it's newly acquired bit of food back home to feed the kids.

The ant was eating me.

It was holding a huge lump of my leg with it's face.

It didnt care at all that it was taking a few cells at a time with, I'm guessing, an ultimate goal of taking all my cells. At least all the squishy ones.

I murdered it of course.

But then I remembered I didnt like killing things because of the cockroach event.

But then I remembered that an ant cant really live on it's own. It's just a few cells out of a much bigger creature that is the entire nest. Some critters that live like this cant even feed themselves without other critters from the hive helping. Bees and ants (except for solitary varieties) are just tiny bits of a bigger organism.

So if one bites you and takes some of you home...

Murder it.

Somebody else will take care of their kids.

The hive won't even care.




120 Things in 20 Years wants to acknowledge things are killed on my behalf all the time, that I kill things to eat all the time, and the bees and ants we might normally meet dont actually have kids. Also we all eat thousands of cheese mites (found on cheese, flour, plant leaves etc. I just thought you should know.

Thinking - Pest control

Once when I was eighteen years old or so, I owned a ghetto-blaster style sound system.

Which is interesting enough as it stands.

But to add interest to the narrative, I once saw a remarkable thing occur upon it's top surface.

A cockroach walked across it.

I realize at this point that this is still not the gripping tale promised by it's title, but there's more...

I rolled up some junk mail* vouchers for fast food and furniture, and just as I was about to kill it, it died.

It just died right there in front of me while I watched. I presume it died of old age. I have a slight allergy to bug spray type product (I get hay fever from them) so it wasn't because of a surface spray or anything.

I'm guessing it didnt die of a heart attack or anything, because I've notice in squashed cockroaches there's no sign of a heart of anything else meaningful.

Just mush.

I always assumed they dont have organs, just soup, and something that makes their legs twitch to give their famous ability to scurry.

Here's my impression of an actual X-ray of the mush inside a healthy, living cockroach.

Pretty convincing stuff.







Anyway...

The thing just up and died right in front of me just seconds before I was going to kill it.

I was going to rob it of those last few seconds of life.

It changed the way I saw killing things for a while.

Until the ant incident a few months later, but thats a story for another day.

That's it really.

I just thought you should know.


120 Things in 20 years thinks it may be the only person on earth to have seen an insect die of old age.

*In order to take a relevant photo of something rolled up, I just went out to get the daily batch of junk mail that we have hand delivered to our door every day. Today for the first time in our history here, there has been no delivery. When we lived in the country we didnt get junk mail, so we still find it culturally interesting and worth a read. Before we lived in the country, I lived in the city, so received junk mail, and something called the Messenger Post, which is a free newspaper (looking thing) that someone sees fit to throw at every house in South Australia, and is typically used to help fill recycling bins, and wrapping fish heads. In fact it was most likely a copy of the Messenger Post news paper that I would have rolled up on the day.