/ot/ - Off-topic

When I was a kid I used to kill ants for fun. The methods in which I did this were peculiar enough for me to want to post about them. Just to be clear, I have never hurt any other animals, nor have I wanted to do so as a kid. Besides insects and spiders, I actually love animals. Ants were in a strange sort of limbo for me because while they weren't large enough for me to be afraid of them, I still could not feel even a shred of empathy for them. Being in this limbo is what allowed killing them to be fun to me.

My favorite weapon of choice was a serrated butter knife and my favorite method of killing was to very slightly tap them with the flat part of the blade. Even the tiniest bit of force would cause sever damage to them. I would scout for a victim and once they were selected let them know of my presence by tapping the knife on the ground near them. I would chase them around for a while before finally landing a blow. After the first tap they wouldn't be able to run anymore, but they would still keep moving. A lot of the time their antenna would be bent and some of their appendages would be broken. I would let them walk around a little before tapping them again and again and again until they stopped moving. Here's the first interesting observation that I made about their behavior. If an ant is still capable of moving it's body, but it is sure of its own death, it will curl up into a ball and twitch until it stops moving. Most of the time I tapped them to death before this could occur. The second method of killing would be to simply cut them in half, which required more coordination than I thought it would. I was surprised to discover that if cut low enough, they would continue to walk around after. On some occasions, I thought I saw some kind of trail of flesh following behind them.

I discovered a few, "human", like traits in the ants behavior, although, I may be projecting. For instance, ants that have been cut in half seemed to display more erratic behavior than tapped ants. They were more aimless and frantic in their movements. The reaction of ants to them was also far greater than tapped ants. Ants seem to show some form of fear. Besides killing ants, I also used the knife to both illicit a reaction from them and push them from one location to another. When two healthy ants were pushed into each other they always panicked greatly when put into contact with each other. This panic was far greater when one of the ants was damaged in some way. When simply observing ants without interfering, I noticed that while healthy ants occasionally stopped to interact with other, they never did this with damaged ants, who they seemed to actively avoid. I noticed that ants who have taken notice of me would sometimes stop and possibly look up at me. Sometimes, instead of slowly killing an ant with tapping, I would slowly cut it to pieces with the knife when it is immobilized. Trying to cut off an ants legs while it was still capable of moving was far too much of a pain to try to do regularly. Another method was to grind the ant against the rough space between my kitchen tiles with the knife, which resulted in the ant being shredded into tiny dots in a straight line. Killing an immobilized ant in this manner in front of another immobilized ant seemed to illicit a frantic reaction and greater fear of being into that space. The most resilient moving part of an ant is the antenna. Even when immobilized and almost totally dead, the antenna would still frantically move regardless of how bent and broken they were. The only way to stop the movement of the antenna was to either cut them off or kill the ant.

The large scale behavior noticeably shifted after enough of their numbers were eliminated. If in a small area there was a mass grave of ant corpses, regardless of the number of crumbs, some ants would avoid the area upon sight. I saw what seemed to be shock in one ant who unexpectedly encountered such a scene and promptly fled. The area that the ants occupied changed depending on the killings.