Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [191]
3. Through powerful identity labels, nationalism among people today provides for bonds and a sense of kinship even among strangers; see Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
4. D Liang, J Silverman 2000, “You are what you eat”: Diet modifies cuticular hydrocarbons and nestmate recognition in the Argentine ant, Linepithema humile, Naturwissenschaften 87: 412–416. As this book goes to press, the identity of the compounds used by Argentine ants to identify enemies are being determined; M Brandt, E van Wilgenburg, R Sulc, KJ Shea, ND Tsutsui 2009, The scent of supercolonies: the discovery, synthesis and behavioral verification of ant colony recognition cues, BMC Biol. in press.
5. MA Elgar, RA Allan 2006, Chemical mimicry of the ant Oecophylla smaragdina by the myrmecophilous spider Cosmophasis bitaeniata: Is it colony-specific? J. Ethol. 24: 239–246. Other “guests,” from silverfish to beetles, survive in ant nests by cunning use of pilfered identity signals—it’s a source of amazement to me that almost none infiltrate Argentine ant colonies, suggesting their colony identity is a tough nut to crack.
6. Because of the universality of social bonding in nature, an alien coming to Earth before the evolution of man would not have picked ants as the dominant social force, as claimed by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson in The Superorganism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), though I like to think aliens would be as fascinated with ants as I am. Even microbes arose through the social union of smaller microbes, and those in turn through a union of complex molecules; see Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
7. One review suggests that treating a colony as an individual is more enlightening than treating it more narrowly as a superorganism; see A Hamilton, NR Smith, MH Haber, Social insects and the individuality thesis: Cohesion and the colony as a selectable individual, in Organization of Insect Societies: From Genome to Sociocomplexity, ed. Jürgen Gadau and Jennifer Fewell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 572–589. While this view has merit in some of the situations these authors discuss, parallels to organisms can both be compelling and lead to useful models (see Conclusion). For reviews of the evolution of identity, see ND Tsutsui 2004, Scents of self: The expression component of self/non-self recognition systems, Ann. Zool. Fenn. 41: 713–727; CM Payne, CV Tillberg, AV Suarez 2004, Recognition systems and biological invasions, Ann. Zool. Fenn. 41: 843–858; and John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, The Major Transitions in Evolution (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1995).
8. Crematogaster levior ants can share a garden with any of several alternative ant species. Nevertheless, they manage to recognize workers of the resident colony, distinguishing them from all other alien colonies; see J Orviel, C Errard, A Dejean 1997, Ant gardens: Interspecific recognition in parabiotic ant species, Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 40: 87–93.
9. Actually, there is no evidence for any ant species that workers distinguish between individuals in their nest by kinship or by genetic differences, and therefore no reason to expect aggression within a colony on this basis, no matter how many queens there are and how genetically diverse the nestmates might be; see DC Queller, JE Strassmann 2002, The many selves of social insects, Science 296: 311–313. In fact, supercolonies vary in genetic diversity, and even the more diverse of them show no sign of internal squabbling; see ND Tsutsui, AV Suarez, RK Grosberg 2003, Genetic diversity, asymmetrical aggression, and recognition in a widespread invasive species, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 100: 1078–1083.
10. In some cases, colony odors arise primarily in queens; see A Hefetz 2007, The evolution of hydrocarbon pheromone parsimony in ants—Interplay of colony odor uniformity and odor idiosyncrasy, Myrmecol. News 10: 59–68.
11. ML Thomas, CM Payne-Makrisâ, AV Suarez, ND Tsutsui, DA