“We must all learn to live together as brothers, or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Over the last few weeks, the Providence Department of Public Safety cleared multiple tent encampments across the city. Homelessness rates were already skyrocketing, driven by a pervasive lack of affordable healthcare and housing. City councilors Miguel Sanchez and Justin Roias opened the doors of their council chamber as an emergency overnight warming space. But as the mayor and governor refuse to publicly acknowledge the severity of the housing crisis and instead make untruthful claims about the availability of space in our state’s few shelters, they simultaneously and forcibly evict folks sheltering in tents, out of the general public’s sight, trying their hardest to scrape by and keep each other alive.
Ants make their homes in countless different ways. Here in Providence, ants are nesting under rocks and within sidewalk cracks, beneath our garden beds and, very occasionally, in our homes along with us. The needle ants on campus at Providence College nest within sprinkler utility boxes and likely take advantage of a steam pressure release valve to stay warm throughout the winter. Acorn ants can be found almost everywhere, some of nature’s most efficient and busiest house-hunters, picking up and moving between the hollow cavities of acorns and hickory nuts as they become available. Ants in other parts of the state build large mounds of pine needles and cultivate microbial communities so that their collective metabolic heat production serves as a warming system for the nest. In other places ants nest within galls, symbiotic domatia, and even stitch leaves together with silken threads, creating elaborate arboreal woven tapestries which they defend aggressively.
But some of the most dramatically stunning ant homes are made by the ants themselves – literally. In ant genera such as Eciton or Dorylus, relatively enormous colonies move through their habitats engaging in predatory swarming and raid behaviors that earned them the name, at least in western nomenclature, of army ants. Other languages refer to these ants as rain ants or weaver ants for the way their movements are linked to the weather and in concert with symbionts moving together with the swarms. Unlike many ants that use external resources for nesting enclosures, since these colonies are so often on the move, when they stop, thousands of individuals collectively link hands and feet together to protect their queen, using their interwoven bodies to drape over and shield her and their developing sisters. These enclosures are often called bivouacs, drawing from the militaristic term for temporary soldier camps, but they are more accurately field hospitals or emergency shelters.
By clearing encampments in the human world, we are denying people the bare minimum, a place to create safety and stability. As the call went out for help at City Hall and at the DaVinci Center, dozens of volunteers from across the region came together, self-organizing mutual aid networks to help provide support, donations, and staffing to shield and protect members of our city’s unhoused community, at least for a few nights. Our most senior elected officials may be in denial about the urgency of our current housing crisis and, in lieu of providing permanent, supportive housing to the unhoused community, our government is wreaking violence at every level; but shelter is a right, not a privilege, and whether in a colony of ants or as brothers and sisters spread across the city, we are all “tied together in the single garment of destiny” (MLK) – the crisis is one we must all face together. •
Illustration by Danika Valentine. Follow Dr. Jane and her research lab on Instagram @antlabpvd or on the web at lovetheants.org.
