Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [23]
Nowhere along her route did I observe other individuals guiding her, or her influencing other workers. As with army ants, the marauder ant is a species with no established leaders. If I could communicate “take me to your leader” to one of them, it’s unlikely I would be shown the queen, who, like all ant queens, lays eggs but coordinates nothing. Nor does any of her workers inspire, cajole, or force the whole army to take a line of action. Proverbs 6:6–8 makes this point: we must “go to the ant” and “consider her ways, and be wise” because she does the job without “guide, overseer, or ruler.” King Solomon must have been a devoted ant observer to reach this conclusion. In all likelihood, he grew up watching Messor barbarus, the dominant seed harvester of the Mediterranean, which indeed “gathers her food for the harvest,” as the Bible tells us.
The hardworking ant described by King Solomon was likely a solitary-foraging seed harvester ant such as this Messor barbarus from the Kerman region of Iran.
A century ago, Harvard’s erudite ant scholar William Morton Wheeler called army ants “the Huns and Tartars of the insect world.”29 But no myrmecologist has ever identified a Genghis Khan or Attila among them. At best, an individual in the raid may be momentarily better informed than others, giving her a brief and local influence.30 That could happen when a worker at the front sends out recruitment signals to prey—but even then she is likely to be acting in concert with nearby sisters. No ant, in fact, can conceive of the raid in its entirety, know where it is going, or anticipate how the masses will respond when food is found or enemies encountered. A raid arises through a series of simple actions by each worker and others like her, in an engagement that can truly be described as “self-organized.”
Humans constantly have to work around issues of self-interest that would otherwise impede the emergence of social institutions and infrastructure. Our clannish devotion to networks of kin and friends has proved particularly problematic in the context of modern warfare. The solution has been to divide armies into squadrons small enough for the troops to bond and be willing to take risks for one another.31 Ant workers, of course, don’t recognize nestmates as personas in the way I picked out the stump-antennaed individual,32 and they never throw themselves in harm’s way so that particular compatriots might live. What we perceive in ants as acts of heroism and devotion are really more akin to acts of patriotism. Since it is only the superorganism that matters, ant workers instinctively toil and die for the benefit of the colony, without recognition or recompense other than the remote possibility of augmented reproduction by the queen, the one member of the group who is indispensable. Mortality seems to be the basis of the domestic economy for prodigious, combat-savvy ant societies.33 It is difficult not to think of the Spartan mothers who sent their sons off to battle saying, “Come home either with your shield or on it.”34 Brute force, apparently, is the key to tactical success for mass-foraging marauder and army ants.
3 division of labor
In the short grass of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, I dropped to my knees, then lowered myself to my elbows and, at last, to my stomach, eye pressed to soil, camera extended in front of me. My perspective standing up had been abstract, like that