Sex on Six Legs_ Lessons on Life, Love, and Language From the Insect World - Marlene Zuk [80]
Hostility has also been linked with insects in novel ways. A now-defunct band from Houston, Texas, was called "Insect Warfare." Its album World Extermination is being re-released by the deliciously named Earache Records, with apocalyptic cover art showing giant cockroaches, or possibly crickets (I am personally offended by this), fleeing a skeleton looming over a decaying cityscape. Humans are nowhere in sight.
So which is it? Do ant wars and slave-taking raids mean that these, and perhaps the other social insects, are particularly aggressive, and hence that warmongering is natural in animals? Does the devotion and self-sacrifice so approvingly cited by Maeterlinck prevail? A closer look reveals that the real villainy takes place much more surreptitiously, and while less full of carnage, it is far more deadly.
An Army of Savage Lace
WHEN I was a child I went through a phase in which I told people I wanted to be a myrmecologist when I grew up. Although I did indeed spend time watching the ants in our backyard, along with the other insects, I was probably driven more by smug delight at knowing that the word means someone who studies ants than by any actual career motivation. Be that as it may, when we had an assignment in third or fourth grade to read a book and report on it to the rest of the class, I chose a book on ants, and happily launched into a litany of their amazing behaviors. Ants, I proclaimed, made gardens of fungus that they harvested for food. They stored honeydew in their own massively swollen abdomens and fed it to the other workers, droplet by droplet. Not only that, I cheerfully told my classmates, who were by that point probably unnerved if they were not simply bored, but army ants could swarm through entire jungle villages, consuming every living thing they encountered by tearing it to pieces. Cows, pigs, chickens, and people, all were subject to the advancing hordes with their bladed jaws. If one were caught unawares by the oncoming troops, the only recourse was to set one's bedposts in saucers of kerosene, get under the covers, and pray the ants didn't find a way to drop down onto the bed from the ceiling. I was slightly hampered in my explanation of this dire state of affairs by my uncertainty of exactly what kerosene was, but I was sure that if I lived in an area frequented by army ants, I would be able to procure some.
Here my teacher intervened. Surely, she said gently, you are exaggerating. Ants couldn't possibly be that destructive. Perhaps they attacked the animals near the area, or got into a hut or two, but this scale of devastation and carnage seemed a bit much for such tiny creatures.
I dug in my heels. No, I insisted, the book had said (and hence I unswervingly believed) that the ants could tear apart a person in minutes. It wasn't just the odd hen or two, it was An Entire Village. I honestly don't remember exactly how or if this disagreement was resolved, or if my grade on the book report was reduced due to my teacher's suspicion of hyperbole, but I remain convinced that people don't fully appreciate the wonders of ants, perhaps because they refuse to believe the extraordinary things ants can do.
Army ants in particular inspire superlatives. They were described in detail in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by legendary scientists such as William Morton Wheeler and Theodore Schneirla; the latter published a paper in 1934 titled "Raiding and Other