Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [165]
5. Group Transport
1. Much of the information on group transport in this and the next section is from MW Moffett 1992, Group transport and other behavior in Daceton armigatum ants in Venezuela, Nat. Geogr. Res. 8: 220–231; and MW Moffett 1988, Cooperative food transport by an Asiatic ant, Nat. Geogr. Res. 4: 386–394.
2. I am grateful to Jane Goodall, George Schaller, John Eisenberg, and Frans de Waal for these examples.
3. WL Brown Jr. 1960, Contributions toward a reclassification of the Formicidae, III: Tribe Amblyoponini, Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool. 122: 145–230.
4. That’s a problem with wood, too; as a result, beavers often drag logs alone, and termites eat wood on the spot or slice it into bits that they then carry solo. African harvester termites, however, slice grass into appropriately sized segments and, on rare occasions, move them as a group.
5. VS Banschbach, A Brunelle, KM Bartlett, JY Grivetti, RL Yeamans 2006, Tool use by the forest ant Aphaenogaster rudis: Ecology and task allocation, Insectes Soc. 53: 463–471.
6. B Hölldobler 1981, Foraging and spatiotemporal territories in the honey ant Myrmecocystus mimicus, Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 9: 301–314.
7. Galileo Galilei, “Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences” (1638), in On the Shoulders of Giants, ed. Stephen Hawking (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2002), p. 498.
8. John H. Sudd, An Introduction to the Behaviour of Ants (London: Edward Arnold, 1967).
9. Owen Holland, personal communication; J Halloy et al. 2007, Social integration of robots into groups of cockroaches to control self-organized choices, Science 318: 1155–1158; and F Mondada, LM Gambardella, D Floreano, S Nolfi, J-L Deneubourg, M Dorigo 2005, The cooperation of swarm-bots, IEEE Robot. Automat. Mag. 12: 21–28.
10. Even ants that perform rudimentary group transport probably balance their loads at least crudely; see NR Franks 1986, Teams in social insects: Group retrieval of prey by army ants (Eciton burchelli), Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 18: 425–429.
11. In most sports, players rotate in and out during a game, so participation isn’t constant; the same holds true for workers entering and leaving a raid. The idea of noninterchangeability as a basis for recognizing “teams” was proposed by George F. Oster and Edward O. Wilson in Caste and Ecology in the Social Insects (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
12. Originally this model was described for army ant transport teams; e.g., C Anderson, NR Franks 2003, Teamwork in animals, robots, and humans, Adv. Study Behav. 33: 1–48; and NR Franks, AB Sendova-Franks, C Anderson 2001, Division of labour within teams of New World and Old World army ants, Anim. Behav. 62: 635–642. Their descriptions of teams don’t resemble our everyday notions of teams, either the teams people form in which tasks are not done at the same time, as in baseball, or teams in which each player does the same thing, as in bowling.
13. The ant’s name has been changed, having been described as Formica schaufussi in the original research; see SK Robson, JFA Traniello, Key individuals and the organisation of labor in ants, in Information Processing in Social Insects, ed. Claire Detrain, Jean-Louis Deneubourg, and Jacques M. Pasteels (New York: Springer, 1999); and SK Robson, JFA Traniello 1998, Resource assessment, recruitment behavior, and organization of cooperative prey retrieval in the ant Formica schaufussi, J. Insect Behav. 11: 1–22.
14. This army ant behavior is described in the references in note 12.
15. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (London: Strahan & Cadell, 1776); see also Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1964).
16. Members of socially complex ant species tend to be simpler than members of simpler societies; e.g., K Jaffe, MJ Hebling-Beraldo 1993, Oxygen consumption and the evolution of order: Negentropy criteria applied to the evolution of