Surrender

I give up. E.O. Wilson (noted Harvard biologist) is right: Earth belongs to the ants.

The ants here have always been relentless in their pursuit of food, but the last few days have gone beyond my patience -- although there's really nothing I can do about it. (See a recent post.)

Yesterday, I went to get one of my individually wrapped cookies. (I have one for breakfast everyday to help keep my fish oil pills down. If I don't have some starch with the fish oil, my stomach reacts violently. It's not pretty.) It was completely empty, just a few tiny holes in the foil-lined package where ants had chewed their way in.

A tiny (1 mm) hole chewed through "protective" packaging. This packaging can keep out humidity, but not ants!

Two more small holes

Today they had attacked my vitamin pills -- again -- they love the sugar coating. (See this post for last year's version of this issue.) I keep my pills in zip-lock plastic bags, but they are too flimsy to hold up against these ants. Like the cookie packaging, a plastic bag is no barrier to determined ants.

This time, I did get a bit of revenge. They also got into my baggie of fish oil capsules.

Holes chewed by ants into the baggie that holds my fish oil capsules. You can see some oil loose in the baggie as well. Yesterday, the capsules were intact.

But ants don't do well swimming in oil.

Ants and oil don't mix.

There was a huge black clump of dead ants, and bits of vitamin pill cover (the pink spots above) on the fish oil baggie. The photo above shows a small portion of this.

I don't want to keep my pills in the refrigerator, because they will get too soggy in this humidity when I pull them out to get one. So I have found a small Tupperware container that should keep them safe.

[All of the photos on this page were taken with a Proscope MicroMobile lens on an iPad.]