This may be the most specific “gag reflex” story I have involved with in … oh, a very, very long time.

So consider that before going forward. You will say “oh, no … ewww!”

We have had issues with ants ever since moving to this apartment complex, just south of downtown Abu Dhabi, in December of 2009. I actually put up a post on this blog, before that, in which I suggested that Abu Dhabi was remarkably free from insects of all sorts.

That assertion was, I soon realized, the sort of uninformed thing someone who lives on the fifth floor of a hotel says. A few big bugs might climb up there, over time, but the basic bugs are not around. Windows never open, cleaners every day … no bugs.

That ended when we arrived at the ground-level Teeny Apartment. We fought ongoing wars with gnats and ants, which I wrote about here and here, and we are going through the same since we moved around the corner last December.

The main problem in this apartment is ants — the smallest of the (at least) three varieties of ants we have seen in this blue-collar neighborhood.

This area has big black ants of the sort you see just about anywhere. The kind that presumably would eat someone staked to a pole by indigenous warriors … but really not all that common. Big, but kinda slow and not that numerous. Not really a problem.

The second sort are small black ants. Again, I am familiar with the type. These are the disciplined marching sorts whose lines often are the first sign of infestation. You see the line going into the house, you follow it to see where they have gone. Fairly easy to track if not easy to eradicate.

It is the third sort of local ant that has been the problem in the Less Teeny Apartment.

These are odd ants on a couple of levels. They are remarkably quick despite being very small. If we could extrapolate their running speed compared to their size … they must be Usain Bolt-fast. Also, their three-segment bodies are of two colors — the first two segments are black, but the third is reddish, and a bit raised. A stinger, perhaps? I know they can inflict some mild punishment, but I don’t know if they are biting or stinging. Actually, I don’t know if ants actually ever sting.

And the third aspect of these ants that is queer is … that they can appear anywhere in the room, in numbers with no marching trail taking them back to a nest.

This is definitely weird. All the ants I ever have known … if you see them swarming a bit of chocolate or a dead fly that hit the floor in the kitchen, you could count on seeing a line branching off from the main activity and going back to the nest.

These ants, however, appear to be in the food business for themselves. That same bit of food on the floor produces a swarm … but those guys aren’t going anywhere. They are there to eat for themselves, not to take it back to a queen or some other ants.

Thus, finding them often is a surprise because the tell-tale lines from outside often do not exist. Occasionally they do, but often they do not.

So.

After about a month in here, the ants realized people were living inside and began getting into things. First it was open packages in the pantry. Then it was sealed packages in the pantry. We realized that these ants had some basic capacity to eat through thin packaging. We would see them in the cupboard, and say, “well, everything in there is sealed” and later discover that they were, in fact, inside the package and, upon examination, could see that they had gnawed/hacked out holes in the packaging.

That led to everything being repackaged, to get foodstuffs inside another layer of plastic.

(We also brought in some boric acid, which we were told would stop them, having long ago given up on the “ant hotels.” Anyway, the boric acid didn’t really work, either.)

Oh, and a note: These ants are so small that they can get into the most teensy openings. Openings that other ants could not wiggle into. Made them even more maddening.

In an attempt to stay clear of these red-tailed ants (I may call them that from now on … Red-Tailed Ants), we began moving things around.

And a prime place to move things was the top of the refrigerator. It was high off the ground … for anything to be found there would require ants to somehow climb up one of the four small legs that keep the fridge off the ground, and then make a long trek uphill with no food along the way … to the top … where they would then also have to climb over the 24-can flat of Diet 7-Up, which certainly would offer no sustenance of interest.

So, on top of that … we put several containers of cereal. Including a small bag of fairly expensive Swiss muesli under the “Crunch’X” brand name.

I have taken to eating that for breakfast. It occurred to me that the raw infusion of a pint of milk flavored with Nesquick probably was not a good nutrition idea on a long-term basis. And I kept the bag up on the flat of Diet 7-Up, some six feet above the ground — the ant equivalent of “atop the Empire State Building.”

And you can see where this is going.

The other morning I banged out some oats and raisins, etc., from my Crunch’X back. I had made an opening in the top of a bag only about an inch wide, and I was able to fold it back in on itself, to keep the cereal fresh.

So, I was eating a bowl of Crunch’X, with milk, and chatting about some local story … when I got down to the milk at the bottom of the bowl.

Now, meusli has all sorts of stuff in it. Some of it which isn’t supposed to be there. People who are really into food cleanliness will tell you that almost every packaged food has stuff in it you really don’t want to know about — as well as broken oats, raisin pieces, etc. So when I saw some small things floating in a half-inch of milk … I don’t immediately go to DefCon 5.

I continued to study the items. “Hmm, small crumbles of oats; must be roughly handled in shipment.”

But wait: those small bits of item, black and red … can be seen because the white of the milk sets them off.

And then the horror hit me: those could be … no, they were … Red-Tailed Ants.

I didn’t think of this immediately, but it’s the same concept. “What’s worse than finding a fly in your soup? Finding half a fly in your soup.”

And what’s worse than seeing Red-Tailed Ants floating in your cereal?

The certain knowledge that you have just consumed many more of their sisters.

Yes. Ick. A big, fat ICK.

I didn’t think I would be sick … aside from the possibility of gagging. I know that some cultures eat ants quite often. I’ve heard of chocolate-covered ants.

But I know where those ants have been, outside in a neighborhood with streets that are never cleaned and are covered in a layer of black goop that is part oil, part organic waste … and all disgusting.

And those ants had climbed up the side of my bag of cereal, six feet high, and were streaming inside the darb-blue package (the color camouflaged them from all but close inspection) … and I had poured goodness knows how many of them into my bowl … before I ate them.

When you are the person who has just not eaten ants, you offer up the “well, a little protein in your cereal!” line. I did that to Leah, a few weeks ago when she found, like, one dead ant inside the packaging of something she had eaten, and she returned the favor. “A little protein!”

Well, thanks, but I prefer to get my protein elsewhere. I would prefer it not be Red-Tailed Ants, the maddening, irresistible despoilers of all food in the UAE.

Can’t actually say I could taste them, though.