No, these ants are not jumping around. Like the improvident grasshopper in Aesop’s fable, they are just hanging out, watching their colleagues head off on military expeditions to invade your kitchen or carry caterpillars 10 to 50 times their own individual weight back to the nest. They resemble the people you’ve worked with who are always on their phones or in the restroom or on break when there is some task to get done pronto.

— You go on without me, I’ll catch up, these ants say as they pop open another brewski. Aaaah! With all of those other ants gone, they can finally get some peace and quiet. Take a load off, they think. Stop and smell the roses. What’s the hurry? That caterpillar will still be there in the morning. Or if not, some other caterpillar, probably.

Biologists at the University of Arizona have determined that as many as 40% of workers in an ant colony may be idle while the other 60% are busily engaged in a project, like digging a tunnel.

Some of these biologists, perhaps themselves having a proclivity for slacking off at crunch time in the lab, showed sympathy for the insect idlers and made excuses for them.

Maybe the 30 to 40% on the sidelines are on standby, waiting for their cue to step in, these scientists suggest; perhaps they are engaged in other, nonvisible, yet important tasks. Like your coworker, who says he was “thinking.”

— Who asked you? The ants say to the biologists. The ants simply do not care about all of these scholarly observations and hypotheses. The ants are on a mission! They have to carry caterpillars and tend the larvae back at the colony. And I wonder how the scientists got the idea for this study, how they even noticed that some of the ant workforce were slacking off in the first place.

My daughter, Molly, and my sister, also Molly, send me articles about people and animals behaving in peculiar ways. My cousin Melinda sends me news of recent dinosaur discoveries. They all know that I will dwell on these articles, reading them over and over, while ignoring everyday chores I should be taking care of, much like a slacker ant.

— What nonvisible task could an ant possibly be performing? I ask myself.

One article listed examples (egg-zamples) of words typically mispronounced by native Michiganders. Comfortable is comf-derbull. Existential is egg-zis-tenchul. Exactly is igzackly. Et cetera.

Molly — my sister — shared an article from Smithsonian Magazine about the stashes of bearded vultures in southern Spain. These vultures have been extinct in the area for decades, but many nests have been well preserved in cool, dry mountain caves and crannies. Families of vultures used the same nests for many generations, refurbishing from year to year. Archeologists have taken nests apart, layer by layer, revealing hoarded items, some of them dating back 650 years.

The vultures did not hoard shiny objects, the way magpies do. Archeologists were rewarded not with doubloons or pieces of eight, but with scraps of cloth, bits of painted leather, rope, a slingshot and a crossbow bolt with a wooden lance. Apparently, the most highly prized object was fashioned not of gold but of fibrous esparto grass — a hand-woven sandal.

Can you imagine how its owner must have searched for his missing sandal?

— Where’s my shoe? He yells.

— Right where you left it, his wife tells him. — Nobody else was wearing your espadrilles. Did you look under the bed?

But of course it never turns up, not for another 650 years, at which point it’s no earthly use to him.

But then a darker thought enters my mind. A vulture is, after all, a scavenger of carrion. Possibly its booty was taken from humans already dead. Maybe the slingshot and the crossbow projectile were considered by the vultures to be spoils of war, gleefully hoarded and gloated over for untold future generations.

— So OK, we vultures are not tool users. Big deal. Who’s got the last laugh now? they might have hissed.

I was just thinking, espresso, pronounced eks-presso, breaks the rule. Like ek-setter-ah. Well, not igzackly.

Have a good week!

(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the News since 1996.)