Ants be like that

I used to keep track of the different ant colonies in my yard as a child and it was the wildest shit. You could tell the difference between colonies by colors & pattern if you looked closely enough. They’d stage ant wars on the sidewalks that lasted days, just ants murdering each other, and the cleanup afterwards would last days longer as the survivors pick up and carry away the carcasses. Once I saw a war happening between the colony that lived under the berry bush and a colony I didn’t recognize, and evidently the berry colony lost, because after the war their nest site was empty… and then a few days later was inhabited by the other colony that had fought them.

Once at a lake I saw an ant travel like 3 meters across flat rock carrying a dead ant, and he kept going until he got to the cliff side and then kept going down towards the water, and he didn’t stop until he got to where the rock was wet. Then he stood there for a few seconds, dropped the corpse into the water, waited a little longer, and then headed back the way he came. I feel like I witnessed a ceremony