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The future clearly contains no shortage of animals to examine. I have a sneaking interest in those silverfish, though. Turns out they have some pretty bizarre mating tactics; the male spins a thread between a vertical object, such as a twig, and the ground and places a sperm packet beneath the thread. He then coaxes a female to walk under the silk, where she picks up the packet with her genital opening. After the sperm have drained into her body, she detaches the packet and eats it. The genetic story behind this kind of sex at a distance must be pretty amazing.

Chapter 3

The Inner Lives of Wasps

Personality in Insects

IN The Sword in the Stone, T. H. White describes how the magician Merlin educates young King Arthur by turning the boy into various beasts: a fish, a snake, a badger. He transforms young Wart, as he is called, into an insect only once, and that only because Wart is confined to his bedroom, with Merlin shouting at him through the door, and more substantial spells have a hard time entering the keyhole. (The logic of this constraint has puzzled me ever since I first read the story as a child, given Merlin's other superior abilities, but perhaps White felt it necessary to find some justification for why one would ever become an insect in the first place.) In any event, Wart becomes an ant, and it is not a happy transformation. Instead of being thrilled at, say, his ability to lift objects heavier than he is, or his exquisite sense of smell, or his remarkable ability to walk on vertical surfaces, the ant-boy is horrified by the lack of individuality among his nest mates. Each ant (with its "mute, menacing helmet of a face") is like every other, obeying the rules of the queen without questions, and a sign above the tunnel states, "Everything not forbidden is compulsory," a slogan that Wart "read with dislike, though he did not understand its meaning."

Although the ants turn out to have many unpleasant qualities, the most chilling one is that they are automatons, with no independent thoughts, designated only by numbers and letters and interchangeable in their repetitive tasks of collecting food and burying their dead. This image of insects, particularly the social species such as ants and bees, is behind countless dystopian views of the behavior of extraterrestrials in science fiction, perhaps best personified, if that is the correct term, by the Borg of Star Trek. These cyborgs assimilate all other beings that cross their path, intoning, "Resistance is futile." They have a queen, work unceasingly, and most crucially, like the ants in White's book, lack all individual identity, having sacrificed it for the good of the group.

Nothing is more important to us than our uniqueness as individuals, and we point to our different personalities as evidence of our humanity. Conformity within the tribe may be valued differently across cultures, but no one thinks a society in which personality is subsumed by service to the state is desirable, even the most diehard communist. Individuality is something of an excuse for selfishness. And while we may freely admit to our pets being distinct individuals, or be willing to believe that a particular elephant or gorilla might be brave or shy, confident or anxious, the buck stops firmly at the backbone. Invertebrates in general, and insects in particular, are assumed to be milling masses of sameness. Perhaps the idea of them as automatons is part of what we find so terrifying about swarms of locusts or bees: each individual is seen as interchangeable with every other, so that killing one has no effect on the rest of the group. They just press on, relentless zombies in our fields and kitchens.

And yet, as with so many other stereotypes about insects, this one turns out to be wrong. They do have personalities, or versions of them, which leads us to question not only the function of individual differences in animals, but in ourselves. We may take pride in individuality, but what is it for? And if being individuals doesn't set us humans apart,