I have to admit I’ve used a little bit of hyperbole here. What you see in this video is not really gigantic ants, something you might envision from the title, The title I imagined from my childhood similar to “the revenge of the cyclops“ (I don’t think that was a real movie though I do remember the cyclops movie). But they can be very dangerous nonetheless.
Back in the 1990s I bought a Samsung laptop, one of their first, which was really very subpar. No, wait, that’s not the right computer. Delete that from your memory. I put together a desktop in about 1994 with an inexpensive keyboard. One day Some of the keys on the keyboard were not working. I looked around and I saw a constant trail of ants going, where I thought was under the keyboard but was actually a constant stream going inside the keyboard. I took the keyboard apart and I found these itsy-bitsy, teeny weenie pieces of silicon all stacked up close to where the ants were coming inside the keyboard. Those keyboards had a silicone pad underneath the keys that would create the travel distance and “pop back“ function for the key so it would go back into the up position after pushing down. The ants had broken off little tiny pieces of silicon and decided they were important to take back to the nest and I guess before they could get them all out of the keyboard they decided to do a stocking up next to the entrance/exit for another group of ants to take back to the nest. I was guessing they had divided up the jobs between the ants. One would break off little silicone pieces and take them back to stack up near the keyboard exit and the other group would carry the little pieces back to the nest. When I looked closely I saw the stream of ants leaving the keyboard actually had very small tiny pieces of silicone meant for the nest.
So this is where the nomen “monster“ comes from. Last week I had taken my MacBook air outside to work on the patio table and then returned it back inside the room. Later in the evening I noticed ants going in and out the USB-C port and imagined the worst, a repeat of 1994 and the attempted total destruction of my computer. That’s when I went to get this little green poison thing to put by the computer. It worked.
Some of you may think this is a very cruel way to deal with ants but I can assure you, according to the computer world, it was life or death, it was them for me.