Toilet Ants

Congratulations!  You’ve found my corner of the internet.  Special thanks to Rob for naming it.  This thing exists because sometimes, stuff happens to me, and then I tell the internet, and then the internet tells me that the stuff is worthy of more than a Facebook post.  We’ll see.

So this time, I need to warn you all–and my future self–about toilet ants.

This is my third spring living in my house, and every year I’ve forgotten until it’s too late:  the ants mount an annual expedition to colonize under my toilet.

I should specify.  I don’t mean behind my toilet.  I don’t mean in the shadow of my toilet.  I mean UNDER it.  You know the porcelain column that goes down into the floor?  They try to live under THAT.  they get in and out through the tiny seams in the floor tiles, which are juuuust big enough to fit them.

I can never tell where exactly they’re coming from, and no amount of Lysol or porcelain grout will deter them:  every time I wipe them out, I find that another expeditionary force has taken the place of the last.  Nor can I fathom why exactly they see the under-toilet as the promised land.  Bit of a food desert, the bathroom.

 Although, of late I have found at least two of them dragging shards of what appeared to be tortilla chips, roughly five times the size of the average ant, toward their would-be toilet home.  This is disconcerting, because–and this is gonna sound crazy, guys–the bathroom is not my preferred area for tortilla chip eating.  In fact, little to no tortilla chip eating takes place anywhere near the bathroom.  They dragged those things the ant equivalent of MILES, just to bring them to the toilet.  To the TOILET.  That, of all the potentially crumb-intensive corners of my house, is the home they’ve chosen for themselves.

…I would also love to know what they planned to do with these comparatively massive pieces of food once they arrived at their destination.  No way would those things have fit through the doorway of their toilet domain.

Each year, after a few weeks of constant failure and obliteration, the ants finally give up, lulling me into a false sense of security so that they can revise their plans, regroup, and try again.

One of these years, they will succeed in colonizing the commode, and they will broadcast a how-to on the Anternet, and soon no toilet will be safe.  Stay vigilant.  You’ve all been warned.  …I have to go figure out where they’re getting those tortilla chips.