The Ant Trap

One Sunday morning in October I sat writing letters in the kitchen of my host mother’s house. I was waiting for an important phone call from the Peace Corps office about my future housing, so decided not to accompany Margaret Rose (host-mom) to mass. She was standing just a few feet away from me when a car horn honked and suddenly she shouted “COME, HALLIE. COME!” with such stern command that I wondered if she’d gotten a puppy, named it Hallie and forgotten to tell me about it. In confusion I just stood up and looked at her, waiting for a little clarification. She didn’t move and neither did I until she said “COME, HALLIE. PUT THE CAKE HERE!” and pointed to a set of bowls on the counter, a small one filled with water inside a larger, shallow one also holding water. I looked all around me and didn’t know where to come and didn’t see a cake but it was clear we were having an emergency, so I just calmly said “I’m sorry, Margaret Rose. I don’t know what’s going on.” At that she gave an exasperated huff and bolted out the door to the waiting car. I ran after her and was handed the mystery cake. Margaret Rose looked me square in the eye like she was about to tell me some seriously serious bad news, paused and said “Ants,” got in the car and rode away.

So here’s how the ant trap works – as with every morsel of unsecured food, the cake attracts the attention of all ants within a 12 mile radius. Because this is the Caribbean the ants would think of this distance in kilometers. The cake-hungry bugs crawl up the white bowl toward the prize and drown in the water. If the ants can swim (and some can) they make it to the second bowl but are usually pretty tuckered out and so cannot muster the strength to scale the cake-plate upside down. The few Lance Armstrong ants that do get to the cake are too exhausted to eat.