Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [152]
Dissension among its ranks and simple organization notwithstanding, even a ponerine colony can be viewed as a superorganism. We’ve seen that while organisms may look like harmonious beings, conflict can be part of any healthy body. And while most familiar living things are complex, there exist simple organisms without division of labor or sophisticated communications; judging from Eudorina elegans, whose cells live and die as a single generation, even a clear separation of reproductive duties is not absolutely required. What all organisms do possess in common with all ant colonies, however, is that the parts are tied absolutely to the whole: no ant, not even a ponerine worker persecuted by her nestmates, has the option to get up and leave. It’s the unbreakable binding force of their shared group identity that makes the colonies of all ant species superorganisms.36
That said, the marauder ant, certain army ants, and the Argentine ant (and perhaps some other invasive species) represent clear pinnacles of superorganism biology, showing the most parallels to biological organisms. These species lack the weaver ants’ versatile social exchanges and the leafcutter ants’ intricate organizational skills—but then so do the cells of such simple organisms as Eudorina elegans and Volvox. What they exhibit strongly is an integration in which the individual ant, as the basic subunit of the superorganism, exhibits a minimal degree of autonomy. She is incapable of learning much on her own, and never wanders more than an inch or two from her sisters. Yet the coordinated feats of the whole colony are remarkable. Despite the fact that army ants don’t build permanent nests, but rather rest en masse, often exposed to the elements, the collective body of interlinked workers is as well regulated and homeostatic as the body of a warm-blooded mammal. In one species, the metabolism and spacing of workers keep a colony’s temperature to within a degree or so of 83.5 degrees Fahrenheit.37
Army ant colonies also have a very low rate of reproduction, investing heavily in one large offspring at a time; this ensures that colonies are as well formed from the start as a newborn mammal.38 Army ants even manage to forgo the infrastructure that keeps most large societies rooted in place and wander the environment with an agility unusual for such a massive social group. As a result of their cohesion, these ants in particular come closest to attaining what the Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck described as a “masked power, sovereignly wise.” Of the honeybee, a species that has achieved a similar level of coordination, Maeterlinck asked in 1901, “What is this ‘spirit of the hive’—where does it reside?”
It comes to pass with bees as with most of the things in this world; we remark some few of their habits; we say they do this, they work in such and such fashion, their queens are born thus, their workers are virgin, they swarm at a certain time. And then we imagine we know them, and ask nothing more. . . . Their life seems very simple to us, and bounded, like every life, by the instinctive cares of reproduction and nourishment. But let the eye draw near, and endeavour to see; and at once the least phenomenon of all becomes overpoweringly complex; we are confronted by the enigma of intellect, of destiny, will, aim, means, causes; the incomprehensible organization of the most insignificant act of life.39
Maeterlinck’s enigmas arise by means both simpler and more universal than he could have imagined. Recent investigations across the sciences and humanities are in fact proving how commonalities among colonies, cities, organisms, and minds run deep, with principles and constraints operating in a similar manner whether we look at a cell, a brain, a body, or a superorganism.40 At each