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.