The Ant’s Chance

The Ant’s Chance
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 13, 2014

My kitchen has become disputed territory. My enemy has drawn its battle lines around the sink. Each morning we meet at dawn, those ants and I. As I pad bleary-eyed towards the kettle, there they are: a black trail advancing upon my benchtop. A swarm of the blighters besieges a lone shortbread crumb.

Two lines of foot soldiers weave unsteadily between the crumb and the window sill, one coming, one going. I note there are twice as many ants as yesterday and feel a surge of annoyance. I watch three scouts march under the coffee machine and emerge next to the toaster, visibly excited by their discovery of a burnt sultana.

I lean over the six-legged troops, flick the kettle on and reach for a teabag. Sensing impending doom, the ants break ranks, abandon their trophies and scatter. I’m barely awake but already I’m plunged into the day’s existential crisis: will I launch a Mortein blitzkrieg or spare my antagonists?

By the time I’ve fetched the milk from the fridge, the ants are in retreat. They take turns slipping into a dark crack in the wall where the splashback meets the benchtop. Within minutes, all but a few stragglers have disappeared. My benchtop will be no Waterloo today.

Don’t get me wrong. I quite like ants. I like stepping over them on the footpath as they make hillocks in the sandy gaps between the slabs. I like the big ones behind glass in museums, pinned to a mounting board. But when I find ants scavenging in my kitchen I dispense death on impulse. Afterwards, I feel a little throb of remorse. Shakespeare said: Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge. Do my ants deserve to die?

I know that in my 47 years on the planet, I have killed scads of harmless insects with my big, dumb, blundering existence. I pay no mind to the countless bugs who’ve slammed against my car windscreen, leaving a smear no bigger than a raindrop as their epitaph.

I’ll happily smash a blowfly or flatten a mosquito and enjoy the victory. I’m grateful for every cockroach corpse.

And yet I play favourites. I’m a fan of spiders. Spiders eat flies. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The man of the house has talent – he can shuffle a live Huntsman onto a sheet of newspaper and slide him out the back door. Daddy-long-legs, no matter how long-legged, are welcome to hang their webs from our cornices. I could never kill a cute lawn beetle or an orange ladybird in stylish polka dots. My children know to rush a leaf raft to any bee flailing in our pool. But ants? Does an invasion of ants warrant a massacre?

On the morning of the ants’ first insurgency, I found several dozen of them mobbing a spilled sardine-shaped biscuit from the cat’s bowl. I swept them to their deaths with a wet paper towel. The next morning, the tribe had trebled its presence. I sucked every last one up the vacuum cleaner and felt smug. On the third day, I awoke to a plague of them.

I bought Borax, mixed it with sugar and lured the ants to my honey trap. I don’t know whose nest they took that Borax to, but it wasn’t theirs. So I called a truce to our war of attrition and tried diversionary tactics instead.

Mum suggested I sprinkle spent coffee grounds along their trail around the sink. But they forged a new track around the hotplate. I wiped down my kitchen bench with vinegar. They congregated on a wooden spoon. I blocked up all the cracks in the tiles with squirts of talcum powder and for two days, we were ant-free. “They’re back!” shouted my daughter the next morning, and pointed to a black conga line snaking out from under the fridge. By now, even the cat was getting antsy.

Perhaps I should convert to Buddhism and practice non-violence towards all living creatures. I’ll carry a broom with me for sweeping aside even the smallest insects from my path. But do the Buddhists know about Ross River Virus? Have they ever felt the sting of a March fly or been attacked by a wasp?

Last summer, the big Cape Lilac tree in our laneway spawned a poolside infestation of hairy black caterpillars. At first, we let them be. But they reproduced in such plague proportions that the kids and I felt nauseous from the constant squishing underfoot. The council sent in their exterminator and poisoned them. I didn’t feel one pang of guilt.

But I’m feeling sorry for my ants – they work long hours for little reward. I count myself lucky no-one’s looking down on me as insignificant and disposable. I should tolerate these harmless creatures a while longer. It’s Christmas, after all.

Bugger of a Bedfellow

Bugger of a Bedfellow
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday March 22, 2014

No-one warned me that the older the house, the bigger the insects. I’m spooked by the mutant army of up-sized bugs who’ve been invading our 1904 brick bungalow.

The Daddy-Long-legs have taken up squatting rights above the shower and patrol there on stilts. Their extended family has taken over the cornices in our living room. I suck them at warp speed into the vacuum cleaner but they travel around in it like a caravan. I know this because when I last opened the lid to change the bag, a Daddy-long-legs crawled out from inside the cavity and took off to inspect the spare bedroom.

I am horrified at the cockroaches with Dreamliner wingspans that power through the back door at sunset. The mosquitoes navigate the holes in our flyscreens like stealth bombers, then roar through my shower of Mortein acid rain.

This summer, the Cape Lilac overhanging our back fence was stripped bare by swarms of hairy black caterpillars. By day, they abseiled by the dozen down the wall and lazed by the pool, scaring the children. Even the birds seemed daunted by such a spiky smorgasbord. In the late afternoon, those caterpillars were scaling the fence back to their leafless roost, shuffling in a seething mass from one side of the tree to the other to remain in the shade.

But nothing could prepare us for the strange bedfellow who joined us for a three-way frolic at 11pm. At first I thought the soft rasping sound was an ingenious variation of foreplay – the sound of a thicket of manly leg- hair rubbing up against my calf. My erotic illusions shattered as the owner of the leg cried into the darkness:

“What the heck is that noise?”

“The house?” I ventured, knowing how the bones of old homes creak and groan at night. “Actually,” I said, “it sounds like it’s coming from IN THE BED!” And with that, I panicked and jabbed at the switch on the bedside lamp. My Greek god leapt up in a flash of red shortie pyjamas, followed a microsecond later by a ripple of tummy. I scrambled to get behind him as my human shield flung back the doona.

At the bottom of the bed, a grotesque insect scrabbled to shrink from the light. It was as wide as my palm, Gravox-brown, with an articulated abdomen like a fat grub and thick stumpy front legs attached to the sides of its head. This thing made E.T. look like George Clooney.

“What IS it?” I yelled as my husband grabbed his prized Spectator magazine and swatted the beast clear of the mattress. It nose-dived into the carpet, landing upside down with its four spindly hind legs in the air. In the next instant, it performed a half twist somersault and righted itself. My husband was as intrigued as I was repulsed.

He warily scooped it up with his magazine and liberated our captive in the parsley patch.

I slept fitfully for dreaming about our creepy intruder. The next morning, I went in search of the entomological explanation. It was, in fact, a Cylindrachetid – a sandgroper – that rarely-seen insect that’s been the nickname for West Australians since South Australians became crow-eaters and Queenslanders, banana-benders.

How we Western sophisticates came to be synonymous with this grub-ugly crawler remains a mystery. Was it the Gold Rush that started it? In 1896, the Fitzroy City newspaper reported that WA’s ‘Sandgropers’ would rather Victorian ‘T’othersiders’ ‘grope in their own soil a little more, instead of rushing in such numbers to dig up West Australian treasure.’

And yet in my lifetime in Perth, I’d never seen a single sandgroper. I’ve questioned friends about sightings but no – they hadn’t seen one either. Apparently sandgropers are common inhabitants of Perth’s dunes and sandy plains, but their subterranean lifestyle precludes them from joining our summer barbecues.

I vaguely remembered Fat Cat and Percy Penguin having a chirpy yellow friend called Sunny Sandgroper on children’s TV in the 70’s. But he was a cute stuffed toy created in the image of a happy caterpillar, not modelled on this burrowing recluse.

A week later, I was startled by a rustling noise in the pantry. Home alone and fearing a jumbo roach, I armed myself with an egg flip and bravely kicked aside three boxes of cereal. Flailing on the floor behind the Rice Bubbles was another sandgroper.

The neighbourhood lawn-mower man had his own theory. “You disturbed them,” he said. “That bob-cat that dug your pool’s the culprit. I reckon they came after you to pay you back!”

He laughed raucously at the idea of a sandgroper in our bed. I giggled uncomfortably, then gave thanks the blighters don’t fly.