Planet of the Ants
Run for your lives! Just as it was foretold in the 1977 Joan Collins vehicle Empire of the Ants (”For they shall inherit the earth… sooner than you think!”), ants are terrible, unstoppable monsters that will stop at nothing short of world domination! Or at least you might think so after reading yesterday’s BBC headline “Ant mega-colony takes over world.”
The BBC story, which piggybacks on an apparently measured scientific study in the journal Insect Sociaux, is bursting with such B-movie hyperbole. “A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world.” The colony “could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.” The ant plague has spread to every continent but Antarctica, and the ants are known for “attacking native animals and crops.” And what’s worse, we’re the engineers of our own certain demise at the hands, er, antennas of our new ant masters: People, it turns out, “are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together…by initially transporting the insects around the world, and by continually introducing ants from the three continents to each other, ensuring the mega-colony continues to mingle.”
Reminds me of the time that sage Simpsons anchorman Kent Brockman mistook a close-up of an ant flying by a space shuttle’s onboard camera for proof that an alien ant invasion was imminent. [Watch]
| The Corvair spacecraft has apparently been taken over — “conquered,” if you will — by a master race of giant space ants. It’s difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: There is no stopping them. The ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. |
Back to the BBC: The idea of ants taking over the world — besides being ridiculous — seems to have almost nothing to do with the cited scientific study, in which the researchers described their subject as “this great non-aggressive ant population.” But when you’re competing with Michael Jackson’s death and Mark Sanford’s affair, I guess it takes a screaming, scary headline like this to draw traffic. And it works. As of this writing, the ants story was the most shared on BBC News’ website.
(Photo: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr)
