• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 551 0

and the acorn ants are known as social parasites. They acquire nutrients not by tapping into an organism’s tissues, in the manner of a tapeworm, but by exploiting the selfless, cooperative behavior of a host animal or, in the ants’ case, host society, as one superorganism exploiting another.11 Social parasites escape the burden of foraging by letting their captives collect food. Slavery is just one means to this end. In some ant species that share a nest, the two groups of ants benefit equally from the housing arrangement; as we have seen, the acrobat ant Crematogaster levior and the carpenter ant Camponotus femoratus raise plants together in canopy gardens. At another extreme are colonies that occupy adjoining chambers in a nest, with one kind of ant soliciting food from the other or surviving on the other’s rubbish. The minute and stealthy thief ant nests in the walls of the chambers of larger ants, infiltrating to steal food and brood. The British banker and naturalist Sir John Lubbock found this social parasite appalling. In 1883 he wrote, “It is as if we had small dwarfs about eighteen inches to two feet long, harbouring in the walls of our houses, and every now and then carrying off some of our children into their horrid dens.”12

In Ohio, while I was watching ants come and go from acorns, Joan Herbers and I talked about ants and people. Naturalists have referred to abducted ants as “slaves” ever since Swiss entomologist Pierre Huber first used the term to describe the behavior in 1810.13 Darwin devoted several pages of his Origin of Species chapter on instinct to a discussion of what he characterized as the “remarkable” “slavemaking” activities of certain species of ants.14 Although the analogy is not perfect, it has become established in the literature.

Ant slavery has notable differences from human slavery. Ants, lacking commerce between societies, don’t buy and sell or trade slaves from colony to colony. Ant species such as the Amazon ant are more dependent on their slaves than humans have been, aside from a few “slave societies” such as the Roman Empire at the time of Augustus.15 Ant slaves can’t breed (but then, they fare no better in their birth society: in ant colonies, usually only the queen has the privilege of reproducing). Ant slaves also seem remarkably acquiescent about their subjugation. Only two species exhibit signs of mutiny: some acorn-dweller slaves will, if not outright revolt, at least undermine the colony by killing their masters’ pupae.16 (Though this could simply be their normal response to finding something strange in the brood pile—some brood just doesn’t smell right.) And slaves of the Amazon ant in Europe will make a getaway at times, with some running off to form satellite nests, even adopting a nest-founding queen of their own species should one pass by. Independence is usually short-lived, however, because the Amazons retaliate with periodic raids to retrieve the escapees, which engage in restrained fighting that quickly leads to acquiescence.17 Other than in these situations, ant slaves seldom try to thwart their captors or attempt to escape them; they die in the defense of their masters exactly as they would have done in their birth nest.18

Kidnapped before they have formulated an identity, the victims imprint unconditionally on their captors through ignorance, not brainwashing. They are similar to the human working class described by Karl Marx—a whole population whose efforts are misdirected to benefit an oppressor.19 As slaves, the ants have lost not freedom (which they never had) but the biological imperative to raise the offspring from their own genetic family.

The indolence of ant slavemakers relies on their captives being programmed to slog through the day without objection, which they do. And just as ant slaves seem oblivious to the fact that they are in a slavemaker colony, slavemakers might not be able to distinguish slaves from their own kin.

For some ants, this is hardly surprising. In the red imported fire ant and some other species, one colony will raid a smaller colony