Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [146]
GEORGE ELIOT, MIDDLEMARCH (1874)
Ants fascinate me as individuals, and I have developed the patience to watch a single worker for an entire day. Yet to focus on the peculiarities of an individual ant is to miss the forest for the trees. Ants, in a sense, are their colonies. In recognition of this, I have explored, at various points in this book, three additional ways of looking at ants. These perspectives may be expressed as analogies: the ant colony is like a human society; the ant colony is like an organism; and the ant colony is like a mind. But before revisiting these, let’s consider the single ant.
THE FIRST WAY: THE ANT AS AN INDIVIDUAL
On my belly in a field near my home in the village of Greenport, Long Island, I spy a worker of the Allegheny mound ant, Formica exsectoides. I approach carefully, anticipating from her dance-like movements what she might do next. The tilt of her head and the rigidity of her legs reveal her focus on the task before her (seeking prey, I decide). I recognize instantly when my presence becomes a distraction. She turns, tenses. Her antennae sweep in my direction, her mandibles gaping. I back off until she settles down. As I watch, by reflex I interpret the ant’s actions in terms of her intentions, even her feelings, much as I would a dog’s, or another human’s.
When she first noticed me, had she felt afraid? Angry? Threatened? Murderous? Perhaps instead she was incapable of having feelings. Was she more like a machine, simply responding to stimuli in a predictable way?
It’s easy for us to think of ants as robots, because we judge other creatures against the standard of what we see in ourselves. Anthropocentrism, the belief that humans are unique or central to the universe, has been challenged by scientists as far back as Copernicus.1 And just as we make assumptions about other people based on their outward appearance—“The human body is the best picture of the human soul,” writes Ludwig Wittgenstein—so we impute consciousness to other beings based on the expressiveness of their bodies, particularly their faces.2 It’s their segmented bodies and masklike faces that lead us to assume that ants do not have “human” qualities of character or intelligence.
But the astonishing truth is that the brains and central nervous systems of ants and human beings share closer evolutionary ties than was once believed.3 In light of this, I disagree with one conclusion of the author who intrigued me with his superorganism ideas when I was a student. Lewis Thomas writes in The Lives of a Cell that an ant “can’t be imagined to have a mind at all, much less a thought.”4 I think it likely there is a mind in there, striving to understand the few things her genetic endowments allow her to. Is she intelligent? To my way of thinking, yes. We know a worker can evaluate the living space, ceiling height, entry dimensions, cleanliness, and illumination of a potential new home for her colony—a masterly feat, considering that she’s a roving speck with no pen, paper, or calculator.
If ants possess intelligence, do they also possess personalities? Can we think of an individual ant as being somehow unique? It is true that an ant’s caste or role in the colony limits the actions and choices that are available to her. But does it follow that, say, all minor workers of the marauder ant are interchangeable? Not necessarily. Other animals exhibit no greater variety of behaviors than do ants, even such vertebrates as the lions, tigers, and bears that we might think of as having personality. But personality is more subtle than what we can discern from simply counting and categorizing behaviors.5 We pass above ants at airplane height, relative to the insect’s size. Use a magnifier, become as intimate with the subject as Goodall was with Flo, Flint, and her other chimpanzees, and it’s possible to notice much more.
At different times I have picked out, by quirks of movement and appearance, what I am confident is the same worker from a marauder ant swarm that I had observed an