Just the other week I was up in Austin with my team for a rugby game. All day we’d noticed there were angry, red mounds of dirt marking the field like zits on a teenage face: fire ant mounds.

It was easy enough to not get stung: just don’t stand on the mounds… until after pulling my hamstring I hopped off the field to go stretch out on the sideline. I kept getting stung by ants and for a good 30 second window was too preoccupied with the injury to question the unusually high volume of ant stings.

I’d plopped myself right down on thankfully a relatively small mound, and now swarms of worker ants were emerging to defend against my unintentional assault on their hive, ready to give their lives to protect the eggs, larvae, and queen somewhere underground beneath the mound. I can’t fault the ants for their defensive response though, for I was the one who had put them in such a compromising situation.

Unable to get up and run, I rolled away from the angry insects and began the process of slapping them all off before they could inject me with any more solenopsin, the chemical from which the ant genus derives its name. The weeks to come would be fraught with itching, burning pustules, marking my body like ant mounds on an Austin field.

Image “ant mounds” by Bart Drees at https://www.flickr.com/photos/bart_drees/2744121399/in/photolist-5bukFV-7bi7Ls-icgn6j-5aZfZT-mfLzHy-4Zt7L2-EobMH-dMhf51-3SHz7G-76m65g-4BnDSj-5oK6dM-dgrpDn-dgrrZy-fgURGK-aP7svF-6bG4wW-9dRnKo-4RpYgk-6u5cuu-jnHrub-6qQAfp-7qeVpc-dyDGhT-gi2sni-e1DJRr-2dA58-2dA59-kzCHHx-ALDtvi-q4Z2sT-dXxpCB-4GqEaf-yuFrHT-6y2awJ-2oaS8A-6mZY6V-7vY32P-38yX9y-YgG4q-pphqPs-FAJakD-55dFJF-e78w8Y-e72TQp-dxhdVa-nfhufd-7ST2Mr-aZQduc-7hwx6t