Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [88]
Yet other, less quarrelsome canopy dwellers manage to survive in the territories of dominant ants by being overlooked or ignored. They creep out of view, run from trouble, or blend with the environment. Commonly referred to as nondominants, these ants may even compete for the same resources as the dominant or “extirpator” species. They may be opportunists, to use the entomological term, subject to attack by the dominant species but able to harvest food before the bullies drive them off. Others are insinuators, who rob meals from under the dominants’ noses by virtue of speed, stealth, or tiny size, in some cases even parasitically sneaking along the dominantants’ recruitment trails. In other cases, the insinuator is active at times of day when the dominant ant is not, or it may simply forage in a nonthreatening manner, for food the dominant species does not want or at sites that it cannot reach, such as the narrow furrows in bark that the speck-sized workers of the ant Carebara explore under the feet of weaver ants.
Most nondominant ants have societies of a few thousand or less, and often much less, as colonies of mere dozens thrive in any ready-made spaces they can find. The relative timidity of these small colonies parallels the behavior of small bands of human hunter-gatherers, which similarly lack basic infrastructure, with no entrenched dwelling places, territorial land, elaborate trail constructions, or stockpiled resources to protect. Full-bore warfare is unnecessarily risky for groups of this size: for human hunting bands, for example, most conflicts are small in scale and arise, as they do for many animals, over issues of power or reproduction.30 Given their mobility and lack of rivalry over land and resources, small groups are otherwise more likely to choose flight over fight—making nondominant ant species easy targets for domination.
Wherever weaver ants occur, they rule over the best sources of nectar and honeydew—those with the most amino acids and sugars. The subordinates remove whatever’s left over, at times sharing the inferior spoils among themselves equally or accessing them in a pecking order.31 Every once in a while one of the more tenacious of these subservient species has its moment of glory, taking over a swatch of the canopy when dominant species are absent.
The weavers’ control of the canopy is so extreme that in times of food scarcity, they will raid the nondominant species nesting within their territories to eat their larvae, in a sense using the contents of these colonies as if they were reserves of food.32 Subordinates could move away, but they may prefer to live with the enemy they know. They might also rely on weaver ants as a homeland security system, scaring off their usual competitors.
Canopy conditions encourage aggressive dominance by species like the weaver ant. For all their complexity, the living spaces in forest canopies are easier to control than areas of equivalent size on flat ground. Hill forts made it easier for people to fight approaching armies; ants similarly take advantage of the height and geometry of plants, which results in chokepoints that limit access to a territory, simplifying its defense. The borderlands that canopy ants guard are restricted; they consist mainly of vines, tree limbs, and the boundaries between tree trunks and the earth. If it were possible to squash flat all the trees occupied by