Insects & others · plate 56 of 60
Ant
Formicidae
Carries many times its weight. Won't mention it.
Only 2.2% of people are Ants. (estimated)
If you're an Ant
You are part of something large and you like it that way. You work, you carry, you follow the trail and you lay one for whoever is behind you. You are brave in a group and lost on your own, and you are not very interested in why, only in what's next. You leave a clean nest and a tidy refuse pile.
A recent estimate puts the number of ants on Earth at around 20 quadrillion, which works out to roughly 2.5 million for every human.
The Ant as a spirit animal
You are dependable, hardworking and happiest inside a system, where your loyalty is total and your questions are few. You do the carrying nobody else wants, and you do it with others, which makes it bearable. The flaw is that you can follow a trail straight into a circle and keep going; ants have been known to march in a ring until they drop. An ant has no individual plan. It has a colony, and that is usually enough.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with an Ant
Do
- Give them a task with a clear line from here to there.
- Join the line; ants trust whoever is on the trail.
- Feed them something sweet and expect the whole family.
Don't
- Don't block the trail. They will go over you.
- Don't ask one ant to decide for the colony; that isn't how it works.
When it goes wrong: A disturbed ant calls the rest with alarm scent; stay calm, don't stamp, and the line reforms around you in minutes.
The Ant in a relationship
You love the household more than any one person in it, and you show it by working. Romance, for most of your species, is a single flight; everything afterward is family. You are faithful, practical and present, and you keep the nest tidy. Grand gestures are for animals with spare time.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 10
- Boldness
- 7
- Energy
- 9
- Curiosity
- 2
- Devotion
- 9
- Roaming
- 4
- Ants find their way and talk to each other mainly through smell, laying scent trails that others follow.
- Leaf-cutter ants grow fungus in underground gardens and have been farming for tens of millions of years.
- Ants carry their dead out of the nest to a refuse pile, and some species keep sick workers away from the brood.
Ants in literature
- The Ant — Aesop's Fables (The Ant and the Grasshopper), Aesop (550 BCE)
- The Ant — Fables (The Cicada and the Ant), Jean de La Fontaine (1668)
- The ant — A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain (1880)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Ant's. If you got Ant, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other insects & others
Among the 60
Brehms Thierleben, Alfred Brehm (1876). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
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