Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [106]
I don’t have any problem with using the term slavery for ant behavior unless people commit the naturalistic fallacy—assuming that if a behavior exists in nature, it is somehow “natural” and therefore morally acceptable in human society. The earliest humans were hunter-gatherers organized around equality, not dominance, and had little use for slaves and limited capacity to keep them, which suggests that slavery is not a part of our own heritage.28 Thus if, as Edward O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler propose, Marxism is better suited to ants than to humans, then, by orders of magnitude, slavery is even less well suited to the human social order.29 While apes and some other vertebrates have been known to express empathy and to act in accordance with rudimentary moral standards, ants do not.30 Regardless of the power of Aesop’s fables, among animals other than ourselves, actions are neither right nor wrong. They just are.
PROPAGATING A SLAVE COLONY
Given the slavemaker penchant for avoiding work, how does an Amazon queen go about founding a new colony?31 I caught a glimpse of the first step during the raid at Sagehen Creek. Among the onrushing workers ran ten queens, their cellophane wings glittering. En route they left the mass to scramble up tufts of grass. At such raised locations unmated queens attract males, using pheromone secretions from their mandibular glands.
After mating, the queen has a choice: she can continue with the raiding party and establish her colony in what remains of the Formica nest after the slavemaker workers have plundered it; or she can strike out on her own to locate a different Formica nest and found her colony there. The first choice has its risks. If she moves into the conquered nest, ants from her original colony might come back later to raid the site again. Retaining no memory that she is a relative, they would kill her burgeoning family.
In either case, the Amazon queen rushes the nest with savage fury, shoving aside any Formica workers that get in her way. She is protected from their attacks by both a tough exoskeleton and repellent secretions.32 Leaping on the Formica queen, the Amazon punctures her counterpart repeatedly with her dagger jaws and then licks the fluids draining from the dying queen’s body. The transformation of the colony is almost instantaneous; mere moments after their queen’s death, her workers undergo what Howard Topoff has called brainwashing: “The Formica workers behave as if sedated. They calmly approach the Polyergus queen and start grooming her—just as they did their own queen. The Polyergus queen, in turn, assembles the scattered Formica pupae into a neat pile and stands triumphantly on top of it. At this point, colony takeover is a done deal.”33
Because the ants in a colony imprint on each other’s scent, licking the dying queen is the slavemaker queen’s macabre way of applying the home-grown perfume. Once she has the colony’s identifying odor, the invader is accepted as one of its own. The opposite is true as well: if the mother queen is removed from a Formica colony prior to the arrival of an Amazon queen, the impostor has no way to appropriate the local scent, and the workers will bite her until she dies.34
The coup d’état does not end with the first queen’s murder. Formica argentea colonies have multiple egg-laying queens, which the slavemaker queen roots out from their safe havens in the nest and executes one after another. Why this is done is not known. Having procured the correct odor by killing one queen, she could commute the death sentences of the others and leave them to produce more workers, which is the resource she will need from the colony. The Amazon queen would thrive without her own workers, and her species would eventually evolve to lose the worker caste entirely, enabling her to concentrate on laying eggs that will grow into future parasitic queens.
Some ants employ that very strategy. Teleutomyrmex schneideri is a European species that produces no workers. The queen infiltrates a colony of a Tetramorium