# The Ant and The Grasshopper - valid moral or UL?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ant-and-the-grasshopper-valid-moral-or-ul/95768>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [November 28, 2001, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ant-and-the-grasshopper-valid-moral-or-ul/95768 "2001-11-28T19:55:52Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![annalamerino](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b3f665/32.png) [@annalamerino](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/annalamerino)\
**Post date:** [November 28, 2001, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ant-and-the-grasshopper-valid-moral-or-ul/95768/1 "2001-11-28T19:55:52Z")

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The Ant and The Grasshopper - valid moral or UL?

I wonder why the Ant is supposed to be smarter than the Grasshopper. Don’t most ants die off in the winter? I know I see a lot less of them.

And grasshoppers, what’s wrong with their system? They seem to have stayed alive as long as the ant. They must be doing something right. They may be less organized (some would call it less bureaucratic), but it works for them.

(…The above questions were posed by my daughters. I’m not much of a bug fan, so I thought maybe someone here knows what’s up with bugs.)

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**Author:** ![Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/50afbb/32.png) [@Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duck_Duck_Goose)\
**Post date:** [November 28, 2001, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ant-and-the-grasshopper-valid-moral-or-ul/95768/2 "2001-11-28T20:24:12Z")

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It’s not an UL–it’s a Aesop’s Fable.  
[http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Aesop/Aesops\_Fables/The\_Ant\_and\_the\_Grasshopper\_p1.html](http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Aesop/Aesops_Fables/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper_p1.html)

Fire ants are the ones who have trouble surviving cold winters, but ants adapted to northern climates do just fine.  
[http://www.simplegiftsfarm.com/Articles/artant.html](http://www.simplegiftsfarm.com/Articles/artant.html)

> [@](#):
>
> Ants themselves are spread throughout North America with colours ranging from black through brown to reddish. Ranging in size from 1/6 to 1/4 inch long, they come in both winged and wingless forms. In general, ant queens lay their eggs continuously throughout the warmer seasons and the colonies hibernate in winter. Normally they spend winter below ground in the ant nest, hill or colony but there are a few species that apparently spend the winter in garden trash.

In general, most adult grasshoppers die in the fall after they’ve laid their eggs in the soil.  
[http://www.sdvc.uwyo.edu/grasshopper/fieldgde.htm#Seasonal%20Cycles](http://www.sdvc.uwyo.edu/grasshopper/fieldgde.htm#Seasonal%20Cycles)

> [@](#):
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> There are probably as many grasshopper life histories as there are grasshopper species.
> 
> Nymphal and adult grasshoppers are present all year long in natural habitats. Several species overwinter in late nymphal stadia and become adult in early spring. The majority, however, pass the winter as eggs protected in the soil.

No doubt Aesop (or whoever wrote the thing–he’s a kind of an UL himself) had noticed that you could go out and dig up ants’ nests in the winter, and there they’d be, doing just fine, whereas it always looked like all the grasshoppers had died off. If you didn’t understand about “instars” and “diapause”, and if you didn’t look around in sheltered spots to see that there were in fact a few adult grasshoppers overwintering, you might come to the conclusion that all the the ants had survived because they had food stored up, and all the grasshoppers had died because they didn’t.

Also, Aesop wasn’t the first one to notice what hard workers ants are. Proverbs 6:6-8:

> [@](#):
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> Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.

So I think the point of the fable is to bludgeon people over the head with the exceedingly pious moral, “It is best to prepare for the days of necessity”, or as my grandma might have put it, “You never know when you might need it”, which was her rationale for saving McDonalds styrofoam hamburger boxes for years and years, not to mention margarine tubs, newspapers, old power bills, etc.