Despite the many jokes, it’s seldom the case, but many presume ants interrupt picnics. Deborah Gordon offers that ants rarely disrupt picnics; John O’Brien suggests maybe they do.
In Ants at Work, Gordon plays down the picnic: “Indeed the observation that where there is a picnic, there will be ants,” she says, “rests on the notion that there is an ant lurking everywhere, all the time, ready to mobilize its nestmates when a picnic appears.”
O’Brien’s “Ants at a Picnic” shows picnickers and ants mutually oblivious to each other’s presence. Nevertheless.
See John O’Brien.” Ants at a Picnic,” The New Yorker (June 15, 1992); Deborah M. Gordon, Ants at Work. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.
*Also, Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915) and A.S. Byatt’s Morpho Eugenia (1992), among others