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hour or a day before. Theory suggests that such distinct personas develop most readily in large ant colonies, where individual ants are less obliged to take on a range of responsibilities and have more opportunities to prefer a certain task and even perfect it through repetition, much like humans learning a trade suitable for city life. This process, combined with any hardwired caste differences, may have repercussions at the colony level, resulting in increased labor specialization that enhances the versatility of the colony; such specialization and versatility are expected to be general characteristics of large societies.6 Still, I find individual ants are easier to distinguish when nests are tiny. Just as with students in a small classroom, I can quickly identify the slackers and the overachievers (the latter are known as colony elites, when drudges might be a better term).7 So-called key individuals take on most of the labor, and in some situations serve as a catalyst, stimulating others to join in. They may be the first to notice that a job needs to be done, just as the same person may always wash the dishes piling in the sink before their spouse gets around to them. Remove an elite, and productivity plummets. Sound familiar? The same thing happens in any office, factory, ball team, or family.

THE SECOND WAY: THE ANT COLONY AS A SOCIETY

Wherever we notice parallels between ant colonies and our own societies, we should remember that the ant societies came first. Ants formed coordinated labor forces of expert homemakers and superb soldiers millions of years before we came on the scene. The leafcutters invented agriculture eons before we did. The army ants have long outdone Attila the Hun. No wonder there has been a tendency since King Solomon not only to empathize with ants, but also to view them as diminutive versions of ourselves.8 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Zeus transforms an army of ants into a horde of human warriors. The poet describes these warriors, the Myrmidons, as

True to their origin. You have seen their bodies,

And they still have their customary talents,

Industry, thrift, endurance; they are eager

For gain, and never easily relinquish

What they have won.9

Just as humans lend their ears to friends, relations, and countrymen, ants are responsive, largely by means of chemical signals, first and foremost to nestmates. They, like us, are the descendants of successful cooperators, and their pursuits are largely social. The commonalities between ants and people are striking. Both alter nature to build nurseries, fortresses, stockyards, and highways, while nurturing friends and livestock and obliterating enemies and vermin. Both ants and humans express tribal bonds and basic needs through ancient, elaborate codes. Both create universes of their own devising through the scale of their domination of the environment. As inveterate organizers, ants and people face similar problems in obtaining and distributing resources, allocating labor and effort, preserving civil unity, and defending communities against outside forces. But compared to humans, ants perform these tasks with a single-minded savagery, and they use anatomical and behavioral tools unique to their size and insect ancestry. Moreover, while human traditions pass from one generation to the next largely by social mechanisms, ants encode their colony’s social systems primarily in their genes.

The variation in size and scale of ant populations matches that of people, from the handful of individuals in a readily movable band to several tens of millions in a vast city. It turns out to be possible to look at an Acanthognathos trapjaw ant colony of a few ants nesting in a twig using the paradigms that anthropologists apply to hunter-gatherers, and to examine megalopolises such as those of weaver ants the way a sociologist would study a human city-state.10 Mature ant societies exhibit many of the same interrelated trends observed in both increasingly complex and increasingly populous human societies: a faster tempo of life and correspondingly higher information