Frazz by Jef Mallett for July 27, 2024

The issue is not how many there are, as long as they’re not in our houses.

I am impressed she knows of a large number and didn’t stutter.

I finally had to resort to the traps; despite my kitchen being clean, they kept sending out scouts. And then they found one crumb..

See Calvin today.

I have more ants this year than ever, and they are little biters. Regular old black ants – one bit me 3 times on my eyelid and that hurts! I need to wear tight fitting clothes to do any work in the garden, especially pulling weeds. VERY lucky they don’t come in my house.

Sure have have enjoyed this series of comics. I also like seeing Frazz talking to other characters, wish we had names but that might be too much to ask, and most liking confusing !

Ants are not individuals. The hive is the personality, that is constantly replacing the individual insect when it looses its usefulness like we constantly shed skin and hair. I don’t mourn or even care about the millions of cells I lose every day.

So don’t feel bad just because some anthropomorphing storytellers gave and give them individuality for millennia. Its not worse than cutting fingernails and hair.

Recently I learned that some species of ants can practice medical triage, and treat or amputate wounded limbs on their compatriots. This can increase an injured ant’s chances of survival from 15% to 90%.

How do entomologists go about determining how many ants there are?

I’ve heard it said that the weight of all the ants on the earth exceeds the weight of all the humans. Maybe. Maybe. I haven’t finished counting yet.

Why break up "Al-

most"? It could have fit on one line.

Or is Frazz pausing between syllables for emphasis?

I use cinnamon, it repels most types of ants, they won’t cross a line of it. It won’t stain if the surface is non-absorbent. It will stain porous surfaces like particle board.

Borax (Boric acid) is toxic to them, there are products ready made for ants. It also gets roaches which is why I get the bottle and put it out in little trays, ant traps are too small.

At least ants don’t pester humans or pass along nasty stuff. For EACH PERSON on earth, there are 17 million flies who do.

It’s either them or you, right?

With that logic, there’s 8,000,000,000 humans – so a few deaths here and there doesn’t really matter – right?

Once I had a sudden infestation of ants in my house. I had an exterminator spray for them, and the next day I saw a column of ants a foot wide reaching from under my house, across the neighbor’s yard, then across the street and into another house. I wonder how many times that exterminator was called.

I recall reading somewhere that, if you were to add up the biomass of every animal on Earth by species, the one with the highest total would be termites, with ants not very far behind.

The dilemma in writing this strip was how did she “say” the number. Displaying it as Jef did is the easiest for us to “see” how big it is. But how did she say it to Frazz? Did she say “twenty quadrillion” which readers may or may not know how big the number is or looks? Did she say “twenty with fifteen zeros”? “Twenty thousand trillion”? Just curious.