Coppery, Metallic, Fanged

I suspect this ant is the Giant Forest Ant Camponotus gigas after doing some Googling but I can't be sure. I was walking to the Buona Vista MRT when I saw one of these bloody big ants with murderous mandibles walking around with a couple of smaller ones. I really wanted to photograph it but didn't have my camera with me, so I did the next best thing - I coaxed the ant into a disposable mineral water bottle and brought it home.

While googling, I found some ant-keeping forums. The practice is called Myrmecology, and the people sound rather like maniacs. I mean, I do understand how much you can like a hobby until you get a bit psycho about it, like I was about marine reef systems in secondary school, but the ant freaks are really pushing the limit.

Their disdain for commercial ant farming kits is similar to the disgust reef aquarists had for the idea of kids keeping clownfish in little tanks when freshwater petshops were importing them by the dozen after Finding Nemo came out, but the rest is... Well here's the Ant-Keeper's Starter's Guide

They wrote something like this about keeping ants within the home: "I just use one big plastic tub. I put baby powder around the edge and that keeps most of the ants inside, however some do get out. But one ant makes little difference in a large colony." Like hello? If ants were running around my house, I wouldn't be worrying about how well the colony's doing, I'd be trying to eradicate it. And another post's talking about how to cut off and preserve male ant genitalia. Yark. Most posts talk about how to hunt for your ant queens by digging up nests in the wild, and there are a couple from Singaporeans talking about hunting ants at Bukit Timah and Peirce Reservoir.

I let it walk around the void deck and photographed it until I was satisfied, then let it go in the grass. I think this species is more solitary so it might not die, but I wasn't about to go back to Buona Vista to return the ant to its natural habitat.

The Buona Vista area's nice. The trees there are large and old, wound with trailing creepers next to swathes of raw red earth scraped out by excavators. The place feels and smells wild, with slopes randomly going up and down and patches of secondary forest where the crickets sing in lush dampness beneath verdant canopies all day long.

There was this girl on the train, looking like a seven-year-old but I think could be older, held sideways in the arms of an ageing old man of slight but stout build, with her feet sprawled on the seat next to mine in the MRT. She was nodding forwards and backwards almost uncontrollably, mumbling incomprehensibly in a soft voice.

To and fro she rocked, to and fro. The old man held her steady, and spoke to her once in Cantonese. Around us, passengers feigned obliviousness, out of unease or pity, but I caught them stealing little glances at her.

I took a look. Her skin had an unhealthy pallor, with a darkened bruise-like spot on her upper arm and one on her forearm and a red one on her foot, looking not unlike the photos of patients manifesting AIDS symptoms. Her right hand was bent back at the wrist towards her arm at an abnormally acute angle, and it was to remain like that for at least the rest of the trip.

When the train got to my stop, which happened to be theirs too, the stout old man hoisted her over his shoulder, her pursed mouth and perpetually shut eyes facing the back, and stolidly carried her out of the train, her wilted form drooping over his shoulder.

Sad. I took out my sketchpad and wrote part of this while I was sitting beside them on the train.