The Strange Superpower of Smelling Ants
I’ve been running on fumes all week. Holiday weekends with 12 hour shifts and 3 hours of blogging per day has my brain absolutely fried. Yesterday, while waiting for lineup to start (the meeting before a restaurant’s shift starts), I was reading out random facts. One of them was that some people could smell ants. Jonathan was like “no way, that’s cool!” and Rosie went, “wait, you can’t smell ants, they smell really bad.”
Anyway, there are people among us who walk through the world with a strange superpower: they can smell ants.
I mean some people (Rosie included) literally smell the bodies of tiny insects, like detecting a faint, acidic scent in the air long before anyone else even notices a trail on the counter. This is literally the kind of thing I would say at a dinner party after two glasses of Pinot, and I have my new fun party trick to make people raise an eyebrow.
The Scent of a Colony
So it turns out that most ants produce a compound called formic acid, the same chemical that gives stinging nettles their bite. It’s sharp and metallic, sort of a little like vinegar. To some people like myself, it’s nothing, but to others, it’s unmistakable, so vivid and strong it’s almost a color.
Scientists have found that we actually vary wildly in our ability to detect formic acid. Some people have olfactory receptors that light up like fireflies when exposed to even the tiniest whiff, while others…nothing, silence, nada, a blank channel.
It’s not genetic superiority (I say because I don’t have the superpower), it’s just genetic variation, the same way some people can smell asparagus in urine after they pee and others can’t. But here’s where it gets even more interesting, because some people aren’t just smelling the acid, they’re detecting pheromones, chemical messages ants leave for one another, a molecular Morse code if you will or a trail only meant for six-legged travelers.
Somehow though, a handful of us hear it too.
Once you realize some people can smell ants, you notice that w’re all filled with oddities, quiet abilities we don’t brag about, because we don’t even know they’re strange.
We just assume everyone experiences life the way we do, but they don’t, not even close.
There are some people out there who can taste words. It’s a form of synesthesia where language dissolves into flavor. The word “Thursday” might taste like mint, “Emily” might taste like powdered sugar, or“regret” might taste like metal. Their brains cross wires and call it truth.
If anyone out there has this, I’d love to know what my words taste like.
Some people genuinely can hear colors, like a bright blue can sound like a bell, and a deep red like a slow drum. Their senses blur into one experience the rest of us can’t really imagine.
Super Tasters are probably my favorite (because I am one). They have thousands more taste buds than the average person. Bitterness is louder, sweetness is neon, and cilantro might taste like soap. Food becomes a full symphony, or an assault depending on what you’re eating. It can also come in handy when you’re a sommelier.
There are some people who can see more colors than others. Most people have three color receptors, but some women out there have four. They can see subtle hues the rest of us don’t have names for, colors hiding between colors, like secret doors in the visible spectrum.
Some magical people can even hear electricity. Fluorescent lights buzz at a frequency most adults lose the ability to detect, but a few people still hear it, an annoying, mosquito-like buzz that follows them from store to store.
The Quietness of Being Unusual
Most people with unusual senses don’t think they’re gifted or think of themselves as special or strange. They simply assume that everyone smells ants. Rosie was shocked when we all told her none of us had the ability to smell what she did.
I like that suddenly, the world isn’t so neat and uniform, but it’s fractured into a mosaic of perception, with each of us living slightly different realities. It makes you wonder about the private universe you live in that no one else experiences. There could very well be a secret ability you’ve been mistaking as ordinary your whole life.
We’re full of strangeness and oddities passed down through our bloodlines like forgotten love letters. That’s what makes this world so fun and interesting. Sometimes, it takes something as simple as smelling ants to remember that being us is much weirder, and much more magical, than we tend to admit. So continue on with your weirdness with pride.
