Ants

I've always had a love/hate relationship with ants. For a time in elementary school we conducted campaigns against colonies, drawing them out and smashing them daily until there were hardly any workers left. But you could never get rid of them entirely. We knew there was a queen that we couldn't reach, but we thought we might be able to seal their colony shut with glue and rocks. But obviously that doesn't work. No matter what we did, they'd always come back. Once I realized that, I developed a respect for them and would study them as empirically as an eight-year-old on lunch break could. One such very scientific study involved comparisons between the red ants and the black ants, whose only visible difference seemed to be their color. Same size, same build, but common lore had it the red ants were more ferocious and and a more painful bite. The experiment consisted of collecting equal numbers of red ants and black ants, shaking the container and pouring them in the same enclosed space together. As I recall the red ants won, though it wasn't a fair match; the red ants ganged up on individual black ants.
I have a feeling that if my everyday experiences with ants were with South American or African ants, I would have just hated them outright. There's something about a river of ants that eats anything in its path that doesn't inspire the same kind of grudging admiration. The ants at Collier Elementary couldn't be kept down, they persevered, they were the underdogs. Those ants are just bullies. And then there are these ants. Nothing about this ant sounds good, it's apparently used in an initiation ritual into manhood. Like the guy said, "Why is it that things that make you a man tend to be such dumb things to do?" I'd prefer a slightly more practical test of manhood, something more Spartan.