Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [105]
Instead of taking slaves outright, human civilizations bent on expansion have often usurped villages and exacted tribute and labor from them while expanding their dominion to encompass the vanquished people’s land. The losers are often allowed to remain with their families and communities; unlike with slaves, their former identities are not completely lost. With time and luck, they may even be incorporated into the victorious society as full citizens. This middle ground of empire building, which requires a large population of victors to quell rebellions, is unknown for ants, for whom surrender followed by a midlife switch in social allegiance is not possible. As part of the spoils of war, ants either take slaves or kill the losers (in which case cannibalism is frequent, as it was in the early stages of human warfare).22 Though the victors commonly reduce the defeated colony in size, they seldom destroy it—as we saw also for army ants, which raid a nest to the point of diminishing returns, then leave the remnants. Unless a colony is weak or its queen is killed, it will likely see another day.
Are ants and humans the only animals that have slavery? Female primates may capture or enforce the adoption of an infant. In Old World monkeys with hierarchies of female dominance, such as the Lowe’s guenon of West Africa and the Bonnet macaque of India, a female may take a baby from a low-ranking mother, possibly to interfere with a competitor or simply because she is attracted to the infant. Female langur monkeys share their young, but an inexperienced juvenile impatient to get her hands on a baby may abduct one from another troop. In no primate, though, is the abducted individual a source of forced labor.23
Much more analogous to the ant model is the activity of a large Australian bird, the white-winged chough. During the four years it needs to reach maturity, a chough stays with its parents and helps them raise its siblings. Without enough assistants, the parents will be unable to adequately build their elaborate mud nest, incubate the eggs, and feed the chicks. In some situations, the parents or their immature helpers will bully a neighboring family until one or more of its fledglings can be shepherded to their own nest, where the new youngsters are raised until they can serve as helpers. Just like ant slaves, fledglings don’t recognize that they’ve been abducted.24
Given our differences from animals, is it reasonable to apply the word slavery to ant practices? Most words usefully encompass a variety of phenomena, and slavery, like many of our names for things, was used first and foremost to define human relationships, before being applied by analogy to the natural world. But just as slavery as practiced in Augustan Rome doesn’t correspond exactly to the behavior of an ant, neither is it the same as slavery in other human societies (consider today’s largely secret slave trade); similarly, the behavior of one ant species does not match that of any other. The attributes of slavemakers vary even from place to place in a single species of ant.25
Joan offers piracy as a more neutral word for this activity in ants.26 Yet piracy, though it involves robbing or plundering, inaccurately describes the ants’ behavior. After all, if pirates forced a person into a life of servitude, that person would be described as a slave. Retired Hunter College professor and Amazon ant expert Howard Topoff quips that adoption may be a better word, but this term isn’t used for situations so insidious as to entail theft followed