I have a small patio area behind my flat, where I sit to smoke my stunted roll-ups, and swat at the staggering amount of flies emanating from the foul-smelling and clearly unwell bush behind me. There is a small hole at the base of the wall beside me, from where ants come and go, scouting the floor for food. I watched one as it came from the hole, following the separating, grouted lines of the patio tiles as if they were roads, always changing direction at right angles.
It came upon a dead fly across its intended path and stopped, its antennae feeling the air. It approached the fly a little closer, walked round it a while, and then headed back from whence it came, back to the hole in the wall. After a moment or so two ants came out and followed the route back to the fly, I imagined they must be the original ant and its buddy, to whom it was showing this find.
Ants will communicate, amongst other methods, by leaving pheromone, or chemical scent trails. On finding a food source, the ant will return to the nest leaving a particular pheromone trail which other ants, on their emergence from the nest, will follow. On their return to the nest, they too will leave the 'food this way' scent, thus the scent of that trail becomes stronger, and more widely followed, until the food source is depleted, the ants disperse and the scent fades.
One of the two ants then returned to the hole in the wall, leaving its compatriot behind. Two, three more ants came from the hole and followed the trail, in its angular line, back to the fly. Now four ants were surrounding the fly, safety in numbers I supposed, they began tentatively to go about dismembering it. Each of the four took a separate leg and began attempting to remove it.
I was down on my hands and knees by now, face no more than an inch or so from the scene. The fly suddenly kicked out a leg against its aggressor. I flinched backwards, startled at the movement and horrified the fly was still alive. I thought of all those wildlife films, of gazelles being eaten alive by lions, and how those filming the scene could not, would not interfere. What was I to do anyway, nurse it back to health with brandy and blankets?
More ants now coming through the hole, following the path. Eventually, I counted, there were seventeen ants on the fly, which would weakly kick again
sporadically. The legs of the fly, one by one, came off, some of them complete, some in two or more pieces, and were carried along the same path back through the hole in the wall. The wings were removed, at the base, and discarded.
Then, as if by some unspoken command, they began to drag the legless, wingless remains back along the path. The ants appeared to take turns to pull the corpse backwards, while some, unhelpfully I thought, stood atop the body in seeming triumph, adding to the weight. They arrived at the hole in the wall, they had to take off the fly's head to get it though, they left that behind.