Thanks so much for reading this, Paul, and for your illuminating response 🙏 It seems to me that in order to arrive, with certainty, at the ultimate Life understanding itself, we have to journey through the not so ultimate life of eat or be eaten.

For me, it is the Buddha's advice that we do not kill other sentient beings that raises and poses the question, what precisely is that being?

One of the responses to this story suggested that a sentient being, in this case, is one to recognizes itself as a sentient being. I doubt the ant does, but I suspect the colony or the copse or the flock does.