A Story of Ant-Brutality

My little sister bought herself an ant farm - one of those gel ones, where you can see through the glass frame all the tiny tunnels that the little blighters make, and watch them waving their little anty antenna around, and doing whatever it is ants decide to do in edible blue gel.

She loved this ant farm. She populated it with a few black ants, and true to form they dug mini catacombs, and ran around, content in their own little ant eutopia. It was the ant equivilent of surburban bliss, with blue gel instead of picket fences. After a while, a few of these ants died fat, content deaths of old age. So, my little sister, concerned that her sociable little ant friends might get lonely now there were so few of them left, trotted off to find some new ants to add to the colony.

She was very careful to chose black ants, as everyone knows black ants and red ants hate each other.

Well, it turns out that there is some civil war going on in black ant land.

It was a massacre. Through the clear glass frame, we could do nothing but stand helplessly by as a vicious and bloody genocide swept through the blue gel tunnels. Limbs were removed, and left to clutter up the floor. Feuding ants formed katamari like balls of rage, that rolled down the gentle inclines of their mini citadel. Corpses were piled in corners. One savage ant trooped onwards, the severed head of a foe still clamped in death onto his hind leg. It made the 300 look like a carebear movie.

In true Highlander form, in the end, there was only one. One battle weary ant, with a dead head still attached to his back leg. He lived out the rest of his days in catacombs full of ant corpses, and my sister didn't dare give him any more friends for fear of the terrible rage he might unleash on them.

When he finally died, she tried washing out all the dead ants from the tunnels with water, but they simply swirled around like a really horrific version of an ant massacre snow globe. She tried to introduce new ants, but as if sensing the death and destruction that had occured in the tunnels below, they huddled on the surface and refused to go inside.

In the end she gave up, and started raising sea monkeys instead.