Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [31]
Windfall fruit and vertebrate carcasses draw much larger crowds that defend and often consume them where they lie. Tens of thousands of workers will dismantle a mango or a dead bird. When I spilled a bag of canary food next to a trail, the ants arrived by the thousands to carry off 300 grams of seeds in eight hours, ten minutes. Under ordinary circumstances, the workers never seemed to become finicky or grow tired of a food, but this overfed colony refused over the next several days to touch any more of the seed.
An assembly line of marauder ants on a grass stalk in Singapore. A media worker extracts grass seeds, which the minor workers carry away.
The one food source that marauders forgo is another kind of bonanza, the populous nests of social insects. Tackling well-fortified bees, wasps, termites, and other ant species requires a convergence of forces to break through the foe’s weak points—a military tactic that marauders lack, though army ants display it in abundance.19 Indeed, almost all army ants gang-raid social insects routinely; many species especially relish the eggs, larvae, and pupae seized from colonies of their ant relations.
Marauder ants don’t just steer clear of social insect nests; they actively avoid making meals of them. When marauders kill another ant species in a skirmish, they cover the bodies with soil and abandon them. Despite this odd and unexplained aversion to cannibalism, the marauders evolved mass foraging in part for the same reason army ants did, as an aid in battle. They might not eat other ants, but they do compete with them for meals. The swarming multitudes in the raids that the workers at the front lines draw upon to subdue prey can also be used to overpower any rival that gets in their way.
Among combative ant species, known as extirpators, trumping competitors is generally a matter of preemptive control of resources. Arriving at the contested area “first with the most,” as General Nathan Bedford Forrest said of battle strategy in the U.S. Civil War, these species succeed by assembling quickly and in abundance. After driving off more timid species, the ant troops can block other belligerent ants from building up at the site in sufficient numbers to fight back.
Because the marauder ant doesn’t employ wide-ranging scouts, this species is seldom first to show up at a feast. But this doesn’t present a problem: the raiding deluge overruns any competitor and keeps rivals at bay—even other extirpators, army ants among them.20 Their tactics bring to mind the “rapid dominance” military doctrine proposed in 1996 by American military theorists. For humans, being on the offensive puts the enemy in a vulnerable position, giving the invaders a sense of invincibility even when it isn’t justified.
The key objective of rapid dominance is to impose this overwhelming level of Shock and Awe against an adversary on an immediate or sufficiently timely basis to paralyze its will to carry on. In crude terms, Rapid Dominance would seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels.21
Marauders similarly take the offensive from the moment they contact alien ants, whether the foreigners number in the thousands or are just two carrying a seed. Often the minor workers blast forward in such abundance that other species fall back with hardly a fight. Even when clashes occur, the marauders triumph by using their first-strike capability. By mowing down enemies a few at a time as the raid advances, the minor workers suffer far fewer casualties than they would if they faced the opposition all at once, a similar outcome to that of the divide-andconquer strategy of large-scale human military actions.22 With the other side routed and unable to recruit assistance, the marauder ants’ control of the booty is likely to remain absolute and uninterrupted from the moment of first contact.