`No benefit to stepping on an ant’

Revealing the evolution of my 180-degree shift in policy.

For the longest time—for as long as I can remember—I’ve had a Me against the Ant World mindset. I’d go out of my way to step on them, with zero remorse.

Quite the opposite: somewhere in my youth, I embraced the notion that if we as a human species stopped killing insects, then they’d soon “take over the world,” whatever that means.

But something’s different now.

The last month or so, whenever ants re-emerged as a daily reality, I avoid crushing them underfoot.

What’s happened?

I came under the influence of my family’s disapproval of my activity. They all know me as a gentle soul generally and found it entirely out of character. I was particularly swayed by my son Zach’s questioning of my Scorched Earth policy. He never went out of his way to hammer me on the subject but his consistent “What are they doing to you?” observation finally won the day.

Zach chuckled this week when I told him of my changed ways. Shaking his head, he remarked, “It’s like, `Why?’ What’s the point in stepping on it? Also, I don’t want them winding up on my shoe. There’s no benefit to stepping on an ant.”

While there may be some exceptions—picnic-intruding ants are fair game in my book, as one example—I think he’s right.

On top of that, my youthful sci-fi horror scenario of them overthrowing humans is undermined by this statistic: for every one of us 8 billion humans on Earth, there are at least 2.5 million ants. That amounts to 20,000,000,000,000,000 (20 quadrillion), according to this September 2022 report that analyzed nearly 500 studies.

With a potential army of that scale, if ants had designs on staging a junta in Liechtenstein or some rural Midwestern American county, they’d have done so by now.

Maybe my recent musings are sparked, at least in part, by the proliferation of cicadas around me. On walks this week, I had to deploy all the dexterity I could muster to avoid smushing the dead and dying ones littering the sidewalk.

My interactions with these intermittent interlopers were capped by the discovery of two cicadas that had somehow found their way into the depth of my backpack on Thursday.

It took me about 10 minutes, and myriad gyrations and exhortations, to extricate them—my no-kill policy extends to them. Between the racket they raise¹ and how they’re dropping like, um, flies, I’ve had about my fill of these critters, too.

1. In Peoria, according to a work colleague who shared an audio file of their noisemaking, they got up to 102 decibels. That’s the equivalent of a rock concert or a train roaring by 100 feet away.