Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [22]
COMPARATIVE MARTIAL ARTS
Even though marauder and army ant campaigns are directed at predation rather than military conquest, the byzantine structure of their pillaging and the frequency with which they do battle with other ants make it tempting to conceive of their “armies” in martial terms. Predation and combat have been linked in human history as well, the tools for one often serving handily for the other, with battles occasionally ending in cannibalism.27
Swarm raids compare neatly to the deployment of Roman heavy infantry and other early battalions that swept forward in a broad front. One Roman innovation was to spread troops a bit more widely than did previous armies, which gave each man a few square meters in which to defend himself. Though their workers are never far apart, marauder and army ants similarly tend to remain a few body lengths away from each other, right up to the front lines, a spacing most likely maintained by the ants in order to avoid treading on one another.28
Naturally, there are differences between the Roman armies and ant armies. Roman troops fell into formation only in times of active conflict, when soldiers on the front lines served as a defensive shield against another army open to view, protecting the soldiers behind them and slowing the advance of the opposing army before them. Among marauder and army ants, in contrast, the foremost workers serve as a contiguous search party to flush out prey. Rarely are the ants’ opponents arranged in a similar configuration; rather, they are discovered and overtaken in sporadic fights.
Despite their tactical responsiveness to prey, marauder raids can seem regimented when compared to the flexibility of Roman legions. Deployed in formations arrayed three deep, the Roman troops could be reconfigured in response to changes in an enemy’s assault. The phalanx might be preceded by cavalry that harried the enemy in advance, for example, or by scouts sent ahead to report on the lay of the land so that the day’s plan could be adjusted accordingly.
My painstaking observations of the marauder ant raids left me with several unanswered questions. Animals as diverse as wolves, birds, and bacteria are able to mass forage in organized groups and then to move off in isolation. Why aren’t marauder ants and army ants similarly able to employ long-distance scouts to assist in their concentrated raids? The risks a marauder or army ant scout might face would seem to be no different from those encountered by any kind of ant that searches on her own, entering a hostile world without backup. Wouldn’t the rewards, for the group, far outweigh the risk to the individual?
Perhaps risk has little to do with it. Watching the marauder ants cart off fruit, seeds, and animal prey, I suspected that the unpredictable quality of their plunder simply made such reconnaissance pointless. Or maybe any tendency for an individual ant to scope out her surroundings—and in so doing wander off on her own—somehow interferes with the mass-foraging process, in which a total fixation on tracking the pheromones of the group is key.
Humans are accustomed to supervision and chains of command that encompass every level from presidents to petty administrators. Roman soldiers wheeled and charged under the direction of officers moving through the ranks. For certain ants, too, transient leadership roles do exist, in some circumstances—as with the successful Leptogenys scout I observed in India, who always stayed with the assembled troops, guiding them to the termites she found. What, then, of the leadership role of individuals in a marauder ant raid?
Once, at the Botanic Gardens, I attempted the near impossible: to follow