Ant Antics

The tiny tiny ant. They come in so many sizes. I saw ants in Malaysia that were like half an inch long - while walking in zori in approaching darkness. We've got a few sizes here in our home, all pretty small, almost always black which never seem to bite. I do feel little stings sometimes walking barefoot and I think maybe that's an ant I'd stepped on that I didn't see. There was just one on the book I was reading that is as tiny as I've ever seen. It was like a 64th of an inch maybe. I blow ants off my computer screen and books. Don't worry about them. So I blew on this one. Wow. It's still there. So I blew harder. Still there. No matter how hard I blew, it just kept walking. So I banged the book on the table. Still there. I banged hard. I realized I had to brush it off but it was so small I was afraid to hurt it. I'm not afraid to hurt them by brushing them off onto the floor as I wouldn't off a high cliff. It went into the binding and I couldn't find it. It seemed to me to be greatly more tenacious than its larger cousins. At first I said to it, "You must be the strongest thing on earth," surely an exaggeration, but one it had earned.  But then I thought it might hang in there not with its strength as much as its design or composition. The little cacak lizards that populate and bless our home I guess have suction feet because they walk on the ceiling as easy as the floor, and much more safely. Maybe the antlet has suction feet or barbed feet that hooked into the paper. Maybe they're aerodynamically built so that wind whips around them with minimal interference. I'm sure there are ant experts who could clarify all this but I don't think it's likely I'll get that far. For now I'll just marvel.