Down In Jungleland Ants love speeding. They whiz up and down insanely narrow stalks and stems, or careen along the ground recklessly, and yet, have you ever encountered an ant with its head smashed in and stuffed up the backside of the ant ahead of it, just because the latter braked suddenly and the tailgater was talking on its mobile? Ants don’t have road accidents. In fact, traffic managers are now studying those marching columns of army ants that blitz across the forest floor to see how they do it. Okay, you shrug, but ants are light — even if they bang into each other they can’t possibly get badly hurt. Right, let’s take those goofy wildebeest then: herds rushing pell-mell towards a steeply banked river. They all jump down steep muddy narrow paths and crumbling cliff faces, one after the other — and then swim into the grinning maws of crocs. Unwise, but they don’t run over or trample each other to death. If they did, there’d be so much less work for the crocs. As for us? One person in a procession slips and falls, panic flares like gunpowder igniting, and within seconds, 1,000 people are trampled to death, most of them children, women or the old. If we emulated wildebeest, god forbid, it would be carnage. And we’re the ones with the big, clever brains, remember. Those great lumbering herds of bison, thundering across the prairies — get in their way and you’re mincemeat, but the point is — they don’t run over each other. They may bump and jostle but they don’t trample each other en masse. And have you seen NASCAR racers spinning round and round the racetrack in similar fashion? One car weaves or wavers and there’s mayhem (which is basically what the audience is waiting for). Watch swarms of insects, say locusts or white ants, take to the air like swirls of smoke — never a collision — and they should be dropping like, um flies! Imagine trying to be an air traffic controller at a beehive that’s just been disturbed. They hum and roar and pour out furiously, but they don’t crash into each other and fall down. Even flocks of birds: watch rosy starlings or sandpipers swirl synchronously in the sky, turning from black to silver to black. It’s thought that each bird keeps track of the ones flying closest to it and catches tiny directional cues which sets off something akin to a Mexican wave. And all that weaving and swerving has a purpose: to confuse predators like the mighty falcon that screams down towards them at 300+ kmph. Imagine us trying to do that? Beggars belief. We have had several mid-air collisions between aircraft, which is quite astounding really considering the size of the sky. Underwater, it’s the same story with shoals of (especially) small fish. There ought to be underwater collisions galore but there aren’t. The “lesser” beings are much better sorted out in managing traffic. Okay, maybe we’ve lost our instinctive reflexes to avoid crashes, but sensibly, we’ve made laws to help us out. What’s stupefying is that we sneer at them and so the Indian death toll is the staggering equivalent of 240 plus Airbus A380s crashing each year. Watch ants enter and exit an ant hole. Watch people enter and exit a Metro coach. Remember the moron’s bathroom and the two reminders on it? “Undressing: First shoes, then trousers. Dressing: first trousers, then shoes.” Got it? Duh! Go ask an ant. Ranjit Lal is an author, environmentalist and bird watcher
