One day when we came home from school, our Mom warned us about some “ants.” Expecting just a few, we were all totally thunderstruck when we walked in and found hundreds of ants marching in what looked like some sort of ant highway!

Our Mom, ever the science teacher, was very interested in this ant behavior. She had done research earlier in the day when she first noticed this. Her hypothesis was that the larger ants we noticed were marching the smaller ants to their colony to work as slaves because they had killed the smaller ant’s queen.

It really was quite a march. I guessed that the whole thing in all was about twelve meters! The ant line started at the very top of the hill near our house and went down, down, down to our front gate and into the drainage system.

My younger brother was a bit concerned with the ethics of the whole ordeal. He wanted to “free the ants.” Well luckily he didn’t try his plan because according to our research, ants do bite, and those big pincers looked really scary!

All in all though it was very insightful to see nature’s magic. It is so impressive to see how similar ants are to us. Some ants even grow a type of fungi to eat like farmers! Even though we think of them as just tiny pests, we may see a glimpse of ourselves in them. We like them are just a tiny piece in the Universe’s big puzzle.