Ant by Charlotte Sleigh

Author:Charlotte Sleigh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

An array of products is available to help rid the home of ant invasions. But still the ants keep coming.

‘You really want to get rid of those ants now, don’t you?’ reads this German cartoon, highlighting the disproportionate fury with which we react to ants’ infractions into our homes.

SLAVE-MAKING ANTS AND DEGENERATION

To humans of the nineteenth century, one of the most interesting features of ant life was slavery. Slavery was obviously a question of paramount importance in North America, but it was also a topical issue for the Europeans, who were effectively creating an enslaved workforce in their colonies. In the earlier part of the nineteenth century, ant slavery had shown how supremacy was a natural part of the animal kingdom; towards its end, as degeneration became an abiding concern, it gave a warning about dependency and its consequences.

Thomas Belt was a geologist and engineer by trade, but when he went on a surveying expedition to Nicaragua on behalf of the Chontales Mining Company, it was the ants that grabbed his attention. He wrote up his observations in A Naturalist in Nicaragua, published in 1874. Belt’s book is often a comparison between Englishmen and the inhabitants of Nicaragua, with ants as the central figures that highlight each contrast. Ants, though adapted to the Nicaraguan landscape, were strikingly like Belt’s ideal of Englishmen, while the Hispanic-Nicaraguan people were the very opposite, being lazy, undisciplined and lacking in innovation.

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