Transcript

Picture yourself awakening from the unique slumber of your imaginal metamorphosis. Emerging from the total reshaping of your body, as you became an adult ant.

[A soundscape fades in. It is composed of crawling sounds interrupted by muffled human voices]

You are a male Tyrannomyrmex rex, and while you spent your larval life in a Singaporean forest, your colony is now trapped in a glass tube handled by naked apes.

Hi and welcome to the Insect Insights, chill insect stories to relax and wonder, available wherever podcasts are. If you like this podcast, you can subscribe, leave a review and even an insect question, on spotify or on the website. I am Max, your host, and I hope you are ready to dive into insect knowledge for another insight!

The smell of your nest-mates is surely there, and you will soon absorb it as your own, but your home definitely smells different as the one you knew as a larva. No smell of rotting wood.

You emerge and leave your pupal skin behind, stretch your wings, look around. Clumps of worker are busy around you, tending to larvae, bringing back pieces of litter-dwelling preys. But no litter to be seen.

And this strange curved wall of transparent material. Gigantic strange shapes are moving on the other side, sometimes staying for a elongated time period. Your worker nest-mates cannot distinguish shapes, with their minimally reduced eyes, they can basically only perceive light levels. But the visual absurdity of this situation isn’t lost on your seeing apparatus, that of a flier.

Far away from the grasp of your understanding, far away from what you care about, these giant naked apes are studying you. Keeping information, capturing images. They will keep a moving image of you, a lasting impression, even after your short life. Even after you are eaten by your sisters, as is customary for a useless reproductive like you, in a situation where mating has no point.

Gone, but not forgotten, little Tyrannomyrmex male.

Sources

Wong, M. K. L.; Yong, G. W. J. Notes on the Habitat and Biology of the Rare Ant Genus Tyrannomyrmex (Fernández, 2003). 2017. https://doi.org/10.20362/AM.009007.