Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [178]
26. Joachim Adis, Herbert O.R. Schubart 1984, Ecological research on arthropods in central Amazonian forest ecosystems with recommendations for study procedures, in Trends in Ecological Research for the 1980s, ed. June H. Cooley and Frank B. Golley (New York: Plenum Press, 1984), pp. 111–144.
27. Michael Goulding, Amazon: The Flooded Forest (New York: Sterling, 1990), pp. 26–27.
28. J Adis 1982, Eco-entomological observations from the Amazon, III: How do leafcutting ants of inundation forests survive flooding? Acta Amazon. 12: 839–840.
29. Information on both carpenter ants is from MB DuBois, R Jander 1985, Leg coordination and swimming in an ant, Camponotus americanus, Physiol. Entomol. 10: 267–270.
30. Simon Robson, personal communication, and MG Nielsen, Nesting biology of the mangrove mudnesting ant Polyrhachis sokolova in northern Australia, Insectes Soc. 44 (1997): 15–21.
31. CM Clarke, RL Kitching 1995, Swimming ants and pitcher plants: A unique ant-plant interaction from Borneo, J. Trop. Ecol. 11: 589–602.
32. HF Bohn, W Federle 2004, Insect aquaplaning: Nepenthes pitcher plants capture prey with the peristome, a fully wettable water-lubricated anisotropic surface, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 101: 14138– 14143.
33. MW Moffett 1989, Notes on the behavior of the dimorphic ant Oligomyrmex overbecki, Psyche 93: 107–116.
34. First proposed for animals in B Rensch 1956, Increase in learning with increase in brain size, Am. Nat. 90: 81–95; for ants, see BL Cole 1985, Size and behavior in ants: Constraints on complexity, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 82: 8548–8551. I doubt that idea applies to most polymorphic species, in which majors tend to be limited in their repertoires. For other intriguing ideas about the relation between colony size, worker size, and productivity, see M Kaspari 2005, Global energy gradients and size in colonial organisms: Worker mass and worker number in ant colonies, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 102: 5079–5083.
35. A baleen whale’s trawling may most closely resemble foraging by army ants, except army ants raid together to catch prey larger than they could individually, whereas whales trawl to catch prey smaller than normal for an animal of their size. Trawling behavior can be very effective for large individuals, and both army ant colonies and whales have evolved to become larger over time. Ironically, the terrestrial vertebrate with the closest equivalent to this behavior may be the anteater; in general, the effectiveness of trawling for a land vertebrate is reduced by the intake of detritus (Brian McNab, personal communication).
36. At a smaller scale, superabundant mites consume plant pests too minute for ants and live in microscopic protective retreats provided by the plants; see GQ Romero, WW Benson 2005, Biotic interactions of mites, plants, and leaf domatia, Curr. Opin. Plant Biol. 8: 436–440; and DE Walter, Hidden in plain sight: Mites in the canopy, in Forest Canopies, 2d ed., ed. Margaret D. Lowman and H. Bruce Rinker (St. Louis, Mo.: Academic Press, 2004), pp. 224–241.
37. Technically, workers operate in “series parallel”; see George F. Oster and Edward O. Wilson, Caste and Ecology in the Social Insects (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 12–14.
38. These systems of control are probably necessary to manage unions of self-interested, often distantly related humans who mostly don’t know each other; see Stephen K. Sanderson, ed., Social Transformations: A General Theory of Historical Development, expanded ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
39. Raphael D. Sagarin and Terence Taylor, eds., Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
40. One World Bank official seeking solutions to global problems has proposed that hierarchical governments be replaced by networked governance; see J-F Rischard, Global issues networks: Desperate times deserve innovative measures, Washington Quarterly 26 (2002): 17–33.
41. A few ants (most of them