Excerpt from an Anthropology Wiki article on the Orichalcum Ants of Isle Nashir, dated April 3rd 2023.
Throughout the history of Eitador, as in any other continent, divine or super supernatural characteristics were attributed to the everyday functioning of natural events and phenomena that were not yet properly studied. Very few examples of this kind of superstition, with perhaps the exception of the Veruvan Cultural Collapse circa 1500 BCE, are as understandable to the modern reader as that which surrounds the behavior of the Orichalcum Ants (Monomorium Orichalis). These ants, named after their reddish-copper appearance, have captured people’s imagination for thousands of years.
Today, we understand that the Orichalcum Ants on the Isle of Nashir are not composed of numerous different colonies in competition, as can be seen with other species of ants in continental Eitador, but are all part of a single supercolony. They are one of only 23 species in the entire world to have an identified supercolony. The Orichalcum Ants have an estimated population of around three-hundred trillion, and they are the only species of ant endemic to Isle Nashir.
Until the industrial revolution, the Isle Nashir’s Ant population was central to beliefs about the island and its history, and these beliefs came to shape people’s behaviors. Nashiri culture has a strong dietary tradition originally based on their assessment of what is and what is not ‘natural’. This assessment was heavily informed by the preferred diet of the Orichalcum Ants. The ants will consume any fish, insects, and vegetation left unattended on the forest floor for more than an hour or two, leaving at most a stripped skeleton. As with almost all species of ants, however, they will not consume the carcases of mammals. The slow rotting of these uneaten corpses in the tropical heat is credited with inspiring a revulsion towards meat in the Nashiri populace. To this day, a large percentage of people on the island follow a pescetarian diet.
It is also believed that the remarkable pervasiveness of the Orichalcum Ants is responsible for the complete lack of endemic saprophagous flies, since while mammal corpses do not make good fodder for them, grubs and insect eggs certainly do. This, in turn, led to practices of maggot farming, and the infamous Xhakhoran maggot trade. As medical science advanced and medical maggots fell out of vogue, the Nashiri maggot farmers began promoting fried grubs in order to keep their businesses afloat. Maggot farming on Isle Nashir has remained a practice for some thousand years. It is no coincidence that it was the Nashir Regional University in 1990 who first proposed a return to medical maggots as a superior alternative to contemporary wound cleansers.
Local Myths and legends often feature the Orichalcum Ant in various roles, usually presenting the collective of them as a single intelligent and benevolent entity. Examples include:
It is also always worth anything that happens in the modern age that would most likely have become a myth in any prior time. In 1962, following a period of sudden and heavy rainfall, a locust swarm from the Jumariyan Plateau, some 400 km across, moved south through Xhakhoro. When the swarm reached the Isle of Nashir, it met its match in the Orichalcum Ants. Those locusts that did not turn aside found themselves swiftly dispatched by the island’s shining defenders. Counterintuitively, this made the locust migration a relatively positive thing for the island. The amount of nutrition from their entry into the ecosystem resulted in a bumper crop that year, sheltering much of the Xhakhoran population from the worst of the resultant food crisis.
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