The Daily Ant maintains “Formicid Form”, a Sunday ant poetry series. When possible, our Verse Correspondant, Natalia Piland, provides a short commentary at the end of each poem. Enjoy!


El Hormiguero (2010)

Song by Calle 13, English translation here

The ants have arrived here,
We are conquering enemy territories,
Invisible, silent, and simultaneous,
The entire invasion is subterraneous.

After an unjustifiably long hiatus (5 weeks!), The Daily Ant is back. And time is on our mind. Ant wrinkles in time.

As consumers of mammalian media surely know already, Ant Wrinkle in Time hit theaters yesterday. Based on the Madeleine L’Engle novel of the same nameAnt Wrinkle in Time tells the story of an ant that sets out to travel through interstellar space on a string.

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An anthropocentric discussion of the protagonist.

It’s hard to believe it, but it’s true. What started out one year ago from yesterday as a podunk formicid-friendly online media project with an inaugural post on loving your house ants has grown into a podunk formicid-friendly online media project with 196 published articles. Whether you’re joining us now for the first time, or have traversed the long foraging trail of myrmecological justice since the very beginning, it’s time to consider what we’ve accomplished together.

In a recent episode of the (wonderfully named) Science for the People podcast, University of Illinois – Chicago PhD student Anika Hazra interviewed myrmecologists Stephen Pratt and Simon Garnier. You may remember Hazra, also a myrmecologist, from her great antforgraphic on ant colony optimization! Now check out her engaging and informative interview of Pratt and Garnier, on ant intelligence, here.