Ants

Written on 10/01/09

Ants are everywhere. I have already become accustomed to ants being part of my daily wardrobe and meals. One is crawling across my computer screen as I type. Surprisingly, they don’t bother me as much as ants in the US used to. I guess because they are unavoidable here. And they are not as big as the carpenter ants that attack my mom’s house every summer. Micronesian ants are little and brown, usually pretty easy to kill when you feel them crawling on you. There are often trails of ants traveling across the walls in my room. If I leave any food outside of a Ziploc bag, it will be infested within an hour. I thought ants on Pohnpei were bad, until I went to Nahlap this past weekend. Nahlap is a small picnic island about a mile off the shore of Pohnpei. The ants there are also everywhere, but they lack the organization that Pohnpeian ants have. Ants in Nahlap just run around in crazy circles, everywhere. Making them hard to kill when they crawl all over you. I am unsure of whether these ants bite or not, I have a lot of bug bites in general, but with all the other sorts of insects around, so it is hard to pinpoint where a specific bite may have come from.