A country ant (left) and a city ant (right) each have five cents. If the city ant steals the country ant's nickel, how much money does he have now?

Journal and photos by Adam Burgess

I’ve got a newfound interest in ants lately and confessed to Neil the other day that I could spend a lifetime analyzing them in all their differing forms. Or lets say if I were to wake up an entomologist tomorrow, I would choose them as my focus. In Rio, the sugar was extremely fine grained, and the ants were minuscule, absolutely tiny and jet-black. I drew the conclusion that ants had evolved to the size of sugar grain around the world, but Praia Do Rosa threw a wrench in the theory. The sugar is the same grain as Rio here, but these ants are among the largest I’ve ever seen and have legs so long and powerful that they belong on a spider. Their heads are huge and black, while their bodies are a wicked red. This flaw in my sugar-grain theory led me to draw a new conclusion.

The city ants have it really easy, and the need of such a machine-like body has become obsolete. Instead, they work in shear numbers almost effortlessly through your tiled sink crack, pouring through in throngs, invisible in size. Whereas; in the countryside, the terrain is a little more demanding what with dirt roads and wild animals. The lack of infrastructure offers less shelter, and so when it pours, these hybrid ants need long legs to hold their torso and massive heads above the puddles.

The benefit to these massive walking heads is that they take away that chunk of food by the sink almost immediately and single-handedly, while the city ants call in an army and work on it for a couple of days. For this reason, I have more respect for the larger brothers, whose ant trail consists of two or three workers. Obviously I’ve got time on my hands. Little is happening here other than relaxing days of surfing and the occasional email.

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