The Ant

#1

What I know about it:

The ant is an insect which is known for congregating in a sort of hive, or colony. Ants form hills or create nests in a variety of places, and work together as a community to mine resources, defend themselves, and reproduce.

Examples in Animation:

There have been three animated movies made about ants that come to my mind off the top of my head, DreamWorks Animation's Antz, Pixar's A Bug's Life, and The Ant Bully by Warner Bros. Some have Criticized Antz for being a flagrant ripoff of Pixar's A Bug's Life. Antz came out a month before Pixar's A Bug's Life. A Bug's Life was Pixar's second animated feature.
The Ant Bully came out years later in 2006. The film cost considerably less than either of the films that preceded it by about a decade, and flopped with flying colors.

A Bug's Life was the most successful of the three films, just about doubling it's $120M budget, but that's still not the great success studios hope for these days.

Ants must have also been the inspiration for the Zerg in StarCraft, the video game. The Zerg are a race of creatures that form a hive colony and who operate completely in concert. All structures they build are biological, and they grow and evolve by mining resources. They work together for what is called "The Overmind," and seemingly have no personal will.

What I've learned About it:

Ants are found in every part of the world except for Antarctica and some remote islands devoid of life. Ants form societies and communities, and through this create a division of labor, communicate between individuals, and are capable of solving complex problems. The makeup of their society is therefore compared to humans fairly often.

Personal Experience:

   When I was growing up my siblings and I, specifically my younger brother and I, loved to explore the woods in our back yard. We loved to climb trees and make forts, wandering along paths and looking for a good walking stick/sword on our journeys.
   There was a particular tree in our side yard that was a pine tree. A small, scraggly thing, probably a virginiana pine, with thin branches and long, soft needles. It was really easy to climb with branches low to the ground and at regular intervals, so my brother Daniel and I used to climb it and call it our lookout or fort. It had sap running down its narrow trunk, and there were often ants running up and down the bark, getting stuck in the sap.
   When I was seven or eight, and Daniel five or six, for some reason it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to try to "survive" by eating ants as a gathered food in the wild, as we ventured in the forest, looking for shelter, exploring the unknown wilds, and bolstering ourselves against enemies. Daniel may deny it, but I think he tried one too; I remember eating several. They were tiny, the really little kind of ants. The little ants never bothered me, especially compared to those large, extremely fast ants, that always seemed to cling to your arms and tickle and terrify you as they looked for food. With these little ones, I would pick one up, crush it with my fingers (because I never wanted something alive in my mouth), and then eat it. Probably not the safest plan, but I lived.

There was another time in the woods in our back yard when we found an old, rusty bucket, half submerged in the dirt. The bottom was nearly gone, and the whole thing was red and rotten with rust. I think Daniel sat on it, or picked it up, and was quickly overwhelmed by thousands of ants filling his clothes. He literally had ants in his pants. I vaguely remember him running screaming out of the woods and Mom helping him get the ants off of him. He was probably four or five.