I must have been dreaming.  The late hours on my ant project had been usurping my normal routine.  But I had to complete the project on time.

It was probably after midnight when it happened.  I had a bright lamp directed at the edge of my ant house, where I had recently discovered a compartment of busy activity at the end of a pattern of ant channels.  I trained my hastily modified microscope on the compartment's outermost recess.  And there, before my unbelieving right eye, or coming out of the microscope eyepiece, was the vision of an ant seated at a desk, with its legs crossed, writing in a miniature journal!

Of course, I could not make out the writing, for it was very small.  But I could see the tiny scribe working away as obliviously as I had done many times, virtually unaware of surroundings.

I needed to modify the microscope further, to have greater magnification.  Which I was able to do, for I kept an array of powerful eyepieces for my astronomy hobby.  I used an eyepiece as a microscope objective lens, and fashioned my Barlow lens as an eyepiece.  But I needed even more light to overcome the greater magnification.  To accomplish this I used a telescope objective to collect the maximum of light from my piano lamp, and thereby focused it on the ant compartment.

It worked!  I could now read what was on the journal.  Though the ant had gone to bed, or something, as I should have done long before, the journal was left open, and I could see the markings it had made.

But the markings made no sense.  They weren't in English, which shouldn't have surprised me.  But they were markings that had difinite groupings, like words.  And there was a mark that delineated groups of words, resembling sentences.  One thing about it bothered me, though.  I could not discern any structure resembling paragraphs.  How frustrating to not see paragraphs!

That's silly, I thought to myself.  Why should I get upset about the absence of paragraphs.  I couldn't even read the letters and words.

I became grateful, at least, for the existence of what appeared to be words made up of letters, even if the letters were unfamiliar.  I moved the microscope to another part of the desk, which was very long compared to an ant.  There were many books on this desk.  But I could never have been prepared for what I saw on one of them that was opened and in full view.  On one page there were the usual ant markings, but on the facing page were writings in English!

A translation dictionary!  Wow!

I will save you, my dear reader, the burden of the elaborate and often tedious task upon which I embarked for the better part of a month, working with the translation dictionary to learn to read ant markings.  I will only say that it required as much patience as inspired deduction, for I had to wait for the ant to turn the page, as it desired, and this required that I look in on many occasions.  Gradually, I pieced together a crude dictionary in reverse, which allowed me to gather the gist of most of the ant writings.

And oh, dear reader, please forgive me for what I am about to relate.  It is not my fault that the ants think the way they do, and have the opinions they have.  I owe it to the resourceful ants to faithfully render what they have recorded and which, by good fortune, I have chanced to encounter.

The one treatise I shall first attempt to tell about has a title that can be roughly translated as "To Save Our Planet."

It begins by stating that 23% of the biomass consists of insects, while Humans represent only 1/45th%.  And given that the ants (which is better translated as Ants, for they capitalize this word) are the most abundant and most intelligent of the insects, it is proposed that the Ants have a duty to become leaders in safeguarding the earth from the humans.

As a digression let me describe something amusing, almost cute, that I learned about their writing from subsequent study.  It's related to the fact that they capitalize Ant yet never capitalize the word humans!  During their history they once had a term to refer to all living things.  Gradually, the name came to exclude humans, thus giving to our species a special category.  But this was not meant as a complement to humans, for they believed that humans were not the same as "animals" (as they used the term "animals").  The term humans, instead, took on a sub-animal connotation.  I gathered, eventually, that they didn't want humans to be a subset of the category animals because humans were somehow less than animal.  End of digression.

They referred to a "Declaration of Species Responsibility," that I never found a copy of, which apparently states that a species has the responsibility, as well as the moral right,  to do whatever it has to do to preserve its future existence.  This surprised me, for it had not occured to me that morality could be based on the aspirations of a species.  This doctrine seemed contrary to sociobiological theory; but that's another issue, and since I never saw their "Declaration..." document I will not attempt to critique it.

The writings in "To Save Our Planet" described a plan to conduct a vote, among the insects initially, concerning a course of action.  (I must warn you that the course of action, which I will be able to describe shortly, makes unpleasant reading!)  Before the vote, they would wage an information campaign among the entire realm of insects.  They would tell the insects that all the world's troubles were caused by one species. They would describe things that we refer to as "the environmental problem." In their description they would use concrete examples that made sense to Ants.  For instance, they would rhetorically ask "Who is responsible for the increased rate of Ant sunburn, and the lower milk production from the aphids?"  Then they'd answer, "It's the humans, for they have released gases, of their own making, into the air, and these gases float to the stratosphere and cause the destruction of ozone, which then allows more sunburning ultraviolet light to reach us Ants and our aphids."

I will admit to a feeling which I am ashamed of.  I said to myself "How cute of them, they're acting just like us humans!"  But I quickly checked this impulsive thought, and resolved to keep my tendency to anthropomorphize under control.  This was hard to do, however.  Especially when I found myself thinking about how laudable it was for mere ants to appeal to the advanced concept of a vote.

I came to realize that they had an even greater genius.  It was strategy.  There was a strategy in the sequence of their plan, and it was all geared to mobilizing for the inevitable actions and sacrifices that would be required of the many species whose participation would be needed.  This will become apparent in due course.

The first vote was to be among only the Ants, with one vote per Ant (there was to be no notice taken as to which of the 8,803 particular species of ant the individual was a member).  This was just an excuse to agitate the Ants into later action.  After the Ant vote, the plan called for a vote among the rest of the insect species.  The count was to be made with a "one species one vote" rule.  This was a diplomatic strategy.  After voting among the insect species, which would surely have the right outcome, they would conduct a vote among the rest of the world's species.

The world vote, they predicted, would be unanimous.  No species would come to the defence of the humans, for they were a threat to all living things.   "Even to themselves," as some Ant pundits proudly proclaimed.  The vote would serve to galvanize support, and produce a unanimity of purpose among the millions of living things.  Surely, the planners claimed, nothing could thwart an entire kingdom of animals from a united war to exterminate just one troublesome species, especially the widely despised humans!

But there were dissenters.  Not of the idea that the humans must go, but of the feasibility of exterminating the humans.  It was pointed out that the humans had friends among the animals.  The dog, the cat, and a handful of other "pets" had become dependent upon humans for their existence in as great a number as they have recently come to enjoy.

"Not to worry!" scoffed the believers!  "The humans have more enemies than friends.  Consider the cows, and pigs, and chickens, and other farm animals that are kept for butchering.  Surely they could be counted on to deal with the pets."  "But wait," countered other Ants, "the cows, and pigs, and other farm animals are maintained in such large numbers by the same farmers who eventually will butcher them.  We would be asking the farm animals to face a choice between a cared-for existence, brief as it may be, and non-existence."  It was concluded that the cows and pigs and other domesticated animals could not be counted on to vote against the humans.

But that didn't bother the supporters, because the number of domesticated species was so small.  An Ant cartoon made this point by referring to a hypothetical tally of 29,999,923 versus 77!  The vote outcome is not the problem, concluded everyone studying the problem.

The weakest part of the plan, it was recognized, was its implementation.  Many Ants wondered why it should be so difficult to exterminate one species when there were almost 30 million species wanting to be rid of it.  Even the number of individual members within the human specie was small.  There were only 5 billion humans to 85 trillion ants   -  plus 765 trillion other insects.  (They didn't count the membership of the species we think of when we think of animals, like elephants, or bears, or gorillas - not because they didn't have a gripe with the humans, but because their numbers are so small.)

"Just imagine," some argued, "for every human there were 35 million Ants; and if we all got together on our timing..."

Just then I was startled by the noise of what I thought was thunder!  However, I awoke to became aware that one of my daughters had closed the door to my study.  And there was the ant house, in front of me, just as it was before I fell asleep after working late to get it ready for my daughter for her school project.
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This site opened:  October 30, 1998.   Last Update: October 30, 1998