I think it’s time to clean the ant carcasses off the kitchen countertop. We’ve been tolerating a controlled infestation for a while now. The ants have been content to station only a handful of footmen patrolling the countertop for crumbs. They haven’t felt the need to launch an all-out assault on our food reserves; neither have we felt the need to employ the nuclear option on their nest. Up to this point, I have simply snuffed out the little suckers one by one with my fingernail—mere skirmishes.
We William and Mary students pride ourselves in our geeky, over-intellectualization of things. In this case, I have outsmarted the collective intelligence of the ant colony because I understand how ants patrol for food. Ants send out scouts to forage, and if an ant returns empty-handed, nothing happens, but if an ant successfully returns with food, that ant deposits a chemical signal alerting other ants to follow that trail for that food source. Consequently, a few more ants venture out, and as ants successfully return with food, more ants follow that trail in greater number.
So even though there have been plenty of crumbs littering the countertop, my sniping the ants has skewed the colony’s data: they think there is far less food than there actually is. Instead of sending a big wave of troops, they have kept their footmen to a minimum. Thus, I have successfully kept the invasion at bay.
That’s how William and Mary students tackle problems—by overcomplicating the simple. I could have wiped up the food crumbs from the counter a while ago, which also would have solved the problem and kept the counter free of dozens of ant bodies. But why would I do that?
Maybe this is why I don’t have a girlfriend.
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