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transport groups came together, but they didn’t adopt behaviors specific to teamwork. This occurred because the media workers had trouble lifting an unwieldy hunk of the tail. Then one of the less common but bigger and stronger “submajor” workers arrived and was able to straddle it in the classic army ant manner and start it moving. Immediately one of the smaller medias crowding around was able to fit into the cramped space under the abdomen of the bigger ant, where she grabbed the scorpion’s stinger, which was trailing on the ground. Thereafter the two functioned, as they often do in this species, as a team, with the forward ant doing the power lifting and steering, while the little one kept the back of the prey from dragging. Meanwhile, the scorpion’s body was being carried by four ants: the same pairing of a submajor and a media handled the main axis of the corpse, with two more medias off to the side, helping lift the scorpion’s appendages.14

A “submajor” Eciton burchellii army ant hefting a chunk of centipede while a smaller media worker behind her lifts its dragging end. The minor worker lying below them in a pothole along the route serves as “living road fill.”

The workers of small ant societies seldom show such collaborations, even of the accidental kind typified by army ants. Being dependent on individual initiative to get things done, each worker is likely to do fine on her own, often aided by special tools, such as trap jaws. Marauder ants serve well as an example of a large society in that the workers are more likely to complete tasks by toiling together or by sharing information with other specialists by means of the language of complex ant societies—chemical communication.

Humans are in some ways similar. Anthropological studies have shown that small groups of hunter-gatherers tend to be labor generalists, with everyone having the ability to be self-sufficient or near to it and pulling his or her weight with a wide range of work (beyond some sexed-based differences). In larger human societies and with increasing urbanization, a complex division of labor in which individuals have limited employment skills becomes more prevalent—as it is for workers in many ant species with large colonies too. This pattern has been understood in humans since 1776, when a Scot, Adam Smith, founded modern economics with his book Wealth of Nations. Smith saw specialization as necessary to the growth and development of societies because of the productivity resulting from each laborer’s skill at his job and the reduction of time lost in switching between jobs.15 But Smith also saw in this specialization the tragic “mental mutilation” of laborers, a decline in intellect from the repetition of menial tasks that he claimed must be countered by management from the state.

This deficiency can be observed for large ant societies as well, in which specialized workers are incapable of accomplishing much without the cooperation of nestmates.16 A lone marauder ant is as hopeless as the urban sophisticate who, as in the movies City Slickers and Romancing the Stone, is dropped into a remote environment where he’s incapable of caring for himself. In contrast to the simple interactions between individuals in ant species with small colonies, however, marauder ants show synergy in spades—not only at the emergent level of entire raids, but also more intimately, in the coordination of smaller, local teams. Group transport of food may be the most vivid example.

Synergy and faithfulness to the whole, not independence, are integral to the functioning of the most well-integrated organisms, just as they are with their social counterpart, the superorganism. A sponge, for example, though clearly an organism, is so simple that its cells often survive for a day or two when forcibly separated from the whole and can reunite to form a new sponge, whereas the cells in spilled human blood or a severed finger will perish, and usually in fast order.

Other animals have learned to work around the marauder’s group transport finesse, as I saw for myself in the