Ants, The New Lemmings

Rasberry ants are the new lemmings. Not exactly, Rasberry ants are the new image of lemmings. This may take a little explaining, so let us take this one step at a time. There is an invasive species of ant destroying electronics in Texas. Despite any hope of mine that the ants will take refuge in Diebold voting machines in the especially red districts, this is a serious problem. The ants are an invasive species, which causes potentially huge threats to our own native species. Invasive species need not be animate either, we have a problem in Florida with typical dune vegetation disappearing (and with it the animal life that feeds on it) because of the invasive Australian Pine. Any trip to Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Hobe Sound, Florida is enough to make you realize how much damage a species can do when it ends up someplace it does not belong. Unlike the Australian Pine, which Floridians planted in the 1800's to stabilize irrigation, the Rasberry ant is thought to be a stowaway from a cargo ship, a little evolutionary joke with nature not accounting for modern mass transit.

Though invasive species are obviously a problem regardless of their individual propensities, there is one aspect of the Rasberry Ant which should make this invasive species part of our vernacular. They regularly follow each other to death by electrocution. Though their teeth, jaws, pincers or whatever ants have, are not strong enough to cut wire, they are strong enough to expose wire and when they encounter a live current, they die and release a pheromone that attracts other ants to the same location creating a build-up of dead ants inside your computer. That's right, they like to nest inside electrical equipment. How little sense does it make that the pheromone released when this ant dies, attracts other ants to the same location, I'd be interested in the evolutionary construct which causes this though it's probably something as simple as the necessity to defend their territory, which is why they like to live in electrical equipment in the first place (one way in, easy to defend).

What does this have to do with Lemmings? There is a common myth about lemmings which we are all familiar with, they jump off of cliffs to kill themselves like a scene from the new M. Night Shyamalan movie. They do not actually commit mass suicide, like many rodents, lemmings disperse when food becomes scarce due to population density in a frantic race for a new home. Nothing stops them, they swim, they climb, and in Norway, they jump into the sea and continue to swim until they drown. Not the brightest animals but they are just doing what evolution has programmed them to do.

In furtherance of the mass suicide myth, Disney, yes Disney, threw lemmings off of a cliff for their movie White Wilderness. The faked scenes from the movie are in the blog post above. All of this bullshit has led us to the point I would like to make. Let's stop calling mindless followers "lemmings", it's at least less appropriate then calling them Rasberry Ants, whose headlong plunge to death because of pheromones is far more akin to suicide then the lemmings search for food. Let us all vow to never describe people as lemmings again, and when someone asks what a Rasberry Ant is, take the opportunity to lecture them about invasive species.