The May Bride — Part 1

created: 2024.05.19. 10:03 · modified: 2024.05.24. 13:38 ·  · license

This post was automatically translated and has not yet been reviewed by me. Please read with discretion.

Spring weddings aren’t just for people. Around mid-May, ants also choose a clear day for their nuptial flights. The timing varies by species, but that’s when the Japanese carpenter ant, one of the ants most commonly seen in Korea, takes flight. So if you visit Seonyudo Park, where plenty of them live, around this time of year, you can find winged ants without too much trouble.

Today, a Sunday, I suddenly decided to go to Seonyudo Park. My company was closed for the whole week, so I hadn’t gone to work. But as if they knew, personal matters that were bound to come up sooner or later all erupted at once, making this an even busier week than usual. They were settled by Friday, and although I had nothing to do yesterday, I needed all of Saturday to recover from the fatigue I’d built up.

So it was only today that I finally had a real day off, with time to do what I wanted. Even then, I only had until the evening, when I’d be heading down to Busan. That’s right: starting May 27, I’ll be commuting to work from Seoul. I’ll still make occasional business trips to Busan, but my “life” there will, for now, come to an end next week.

On a warm day with weather this nice, staying indoors during my free time feels almost like doing something wrong. I knew I had to go somewhere, and then it occurred to me that it must be nuptial-flight season for ants. So I chose Seonyudo Park.

The truth is, I’m quite interested in ant ecology. It’s an unusual interest, so I don’t tend to go into detail about it with people. Ever since I was young, I’ve been fascinated by the way ants race in every direction to rescue their eggs when their home is invaded. My parents still tease me about the family trip we took to the Grand Canyon in the United States: instead of looking at the canyon, I spent my time watching ants. Who hasn’t peered into an anthill as a child? But in my case, the interest persisted as I grew older. It even grew to the point where I sought out material on ants and studied them.

Bernard Werber’s novel The Ants definitely played a part in that growing interest. A friend introduced me to Werber’s novels in sixth grade, and I think it was around my first or second year of middle school that I finally read The Ants (years later, I would meet him in person in his hometown!). Between its sheer length and its increasingly philosophical content, I still haven’t finished the whole series, even more than a decade later. But the first two volumes were enough to make me see ants in a new light.

Even when I was cycling home from school, I’d stop for a long time if I spotted a group of ants doing something unusual. There were burly soldier ants that looked nothing like workers, ants tidying their antennae and composing themselves, fire ants encountering enormous carpenter ants, and more. The first time I was lucky enough to see winged ants, I could have jumped for joy! Princess ants, males, or perhaps both were gathering at the entrance, getting ready to fly. I watched for ages, then hurried off to math academy on my bike. I went straight back to the same spot when class ended, but the sun had already set and I couldn’t see a thing.

It must have been around then that I first thought about raising ants myself, properly. I didn’t mean putting a few captured workers in one of those containers filled with blue gel. I wanted a real colony, with a queen, that could survive and grow. Books and online communities I found around the same time described in detail how an ant colony forms. After her nuptial flight, a princess ant sheds her wings and becomes a queen. She lays eggs and tends them without eating until the first workers emerge. Together with those workers, she builds a colony that can number in the millions. The whole process sounded like a founding myth! I wanted to witness a scene like that for myself.

I studied when nuptial flights happened and waited for the right time. Exactly ten years ago, in May 2014, I was in my third year of middle school. Thinking the time had come, I went to Seonyudo Park, where I’d often seen ants. A colony has a nuptial flight only about once a year, so it would have been no surprise if I’d gone home without seeing anything. But as if the world had heard my wish, there really were queen ants there—and several of them! Thrilled, I scooped them into the plastic container I’d brought and headed home full of hope.

The excitement didn’t last. Something was wrong. I’d given them appropriately sized homes and the right amount of moisture, so they should have started laying eggs. But even after quite a while, none of them showed any sign of doing so. Above all, queens that had finished their nuptial flights should have shed their wings, yet theirs were still attached. Only then did it occur to me: perhaps these weren’t queens that simply hadn’t shed their wings yet, but princess ants that had never flown at all.

I was probably right. Not one of them ever laid an egg. My first attempt ended in failure, leaving me with a painful lesson: I needed to catch only queens that had shed their wings.

Soon it was time to apply to high school. I had to write a personal statement for Hana Academy, the school I would go on to attend, and mine opened with ants, of all things. As I planned it out and looked back over the previous three years, I thought that the path from taking an interest in ants to studying and collecting them best demonstrated my curiosity and initiative. After all, how many parents tell their children, “Go out and catch some ants”?

I worked hard to prepare for the interview, even coming up with questions they might ask about ants. I was a little disappointed when none came up. Fortunately, I was accepted and went on to attend the school.

Hana Academy was a boarding school, and students went home only once a month. Unless I found an ant nest on campus, collecting ants was difficult. To be honest, I was so busy getting through each day that it didn’t even occur to me. Oh, I did go collecting once in the hills behind my neighborhood during summer vacation. It wasn’t nuptial-flight season, so finding a queen meant lifting rocks or prying open logs. I didn’t catch one. But I still remember the smell of formic acid the soldier ants sprayed at the paintbrush* I used to probe inside a log. Whether it’s mosquitoes or ants, the ones in the hills do seem fiercer.

*I often used a paintbrush because trying to catch ants with my hands or tweezers could easily injure them.

Since collecting ants was difficult, my enthusiasm found other outlets. While reading about them, I learned that bees, like ants, are eusocial animals. Bees, too, have complex social structures and ecology. Famously, they even have a way to communicate where food is: the waggle dance. These traits were more than enough to catch my interest again. Whenever I had the chance, I chose eusocial animals as the subject of my assignments. In my first year, I researched the waggle dance and the life of the scientist who won a Nobel Prize for studying it, then submitted my work to an essay competition. In my third year, I took an after-school class in which each student chose a biology topic, read related papers, and presented them. I chose animal behavior as my topic and read and presented several papers on the behavior of ants and bees.

Here are the papers I read then:

1. A systems approach to animal communication
2. The role of multiple pheromones in food recruitment by ants
3. Sibling conflict and dishonest signaling in birds
4. The Drosophila pheromone cVA activates a sexually dimorphic neural circuit
5. The mixed-species chorus as public information: Túngara frogs eavesdrop on a heterospecific
6. Hydrocarbons Emitted by Waggle-Dancing Honey Bees Increase Forager Recruitment by Stimulating Dancing
7. Distributed nestmate recognition in ants

To write this post, I went back through all my records about ants. Goodness, there were so many I’d forgotten about myself. Was I really that absorbed in them? What comes next is the story of my adulthood, and there’s already a mountain of it. This post has grown long enough, so I’ll continue in Part 2.