Antlympic antics

I'm sitting in my living room minding my own business when out of the corner of my eye I catch some movement out on the porch. It looks like a gigantic horsefly sliding across the porch on his back, which is not the textbook method of horsefly locomotion. So I went out and took a look.

It was a fly all right, but it wasn't surfing the cement. Instead, it was being pulled, pushed, carried, and shoved by a group of intrepid red ants. They shoved the fly over the step and it landed in a crevice between bricks on the walk, and it took a handful of ants a good five or ten minutes to get the fly moving again. They moved in a straight line, pulling the fly over a clump of dirt and grass they could more easily have gone around, but nothing was standing in the way of those determined ants.

I watched them for awhile (yes I'm watching ants when I ought to be working on syllabi!) and then went inside to deal with something else, and about 20 minutes later when I looked outside again, there was no sign of ants or fly. Where did they go? No idea, but those little ants ought to get gold medals in the Antlympics!