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By Root 342 0

The Ants, concede, "Yet driver ants are not really the terror of the jungle as popularly conceived," they devote much of their chapter on army ants to the same bloodthirsty details relished by Beebe and other naturalists. Even Maeterlinck, with his enthusiasm for the social virtues exhibited by ants in general and for their food-sharing proclivities in particular, sorrowfully notes, "Even in the ants this universal charity, this perpetual communion, does not prevent wars: though the wars of the ants are less frequent and less cruel than is generally believed." He also saw—or thought he did—a perfect mirror of human foibles: "Every kind of warfare known to ourselves will be found in the world of the ants; open warfare, overwhelming assaults, levies en masse, wars of ambush and surprise and surreptitious infiltration, implacable wars of extermination, incoherent and nerveless campaigns, sieges and investments as wisely ordered as our own, magnificent defenses, furious assaults, desperate sorties, bewildered retreats, strategic withdrawals, and sometimes, though very rarely, brawls between allies, and so forth."

In the midst of this veritable battalion of military metaphors, it might be worth stepping back and considering the actual goal of the army ants themselves. Those forms of warfare Maeterlinck exhaustively details might be better replaced by a far humbler list: going to the grocery store, harvesting vegetables in the garden, or hooking fish in a river. The ants are an army without an enemy. They are predators, and predation is not waging war, it is acquiring food. We seem to like linking hunting live prey with being aggressive, and we seem to especially like linking it to manliness. Predatory animals such as hawks or lions are often depicted as being exceptionally fierce, and so we transfer that to the ants, struggling with the grasshoppers that are elephant sized to them. But the truth is that hunting is a more widespread and less glamorous profession than it is sometimes made out to be. We tend to think of predators as animals that subdue large, warm-blooded prey, usually after a heroic struggle, but there is no a priori reason for us to dismiss animals that catch and kill more modest fare, for example, the ladybug gleaning aphids from a rosebush, or a chickadee nipping an inchworm off of a leaf. Some biologists refer to any food item that comes in a discrete chunk, as opposed to the unending sea of grass in a field, as "prey," and talk about animals such as the seed-eating kangaroo rats as "seed predators." Even if that is going a bit too far for some, is it any less savage to bite a worm than a weasel? Why does a hawk swooping down on a mouse seem more aggressive than a songbird snapping its bill against the hard shell of a beetle?

It's true that hunting, for both humans and other animals, can be risky, and facing up to prey that is bigger than you are and that has sharp teeth or claws can take courage. And in some cultures hunting, because it requires that bravery, is used as a test of manhood. But none of this applies to the ants, not least because, of course, all of the workers—even the ones with the big, bladed jaws—are female and won't get any more kudos from the colony no matter how many tarantulas or pythons they bring down. That they all eat meat doesn't make them any more vicious than the more peaceably named harvester ants that lug heavy seeds back to their nests.

Maybe the emphasis on warfare and aggression in army ants is an effort to counter that idealization of the ants' social harmony that used to be so prevalent. After all, Solomon wanted us as sluggards to look to the ant for inspiration to hard work; he didn't ask us as wimps to look to her for inspiration to violence. Sleigh discusses a book on "natural history and animal morals" published in 1851 by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, which is still active. In it, ants are held up as models of prudence and industry from which humans are exhorted to learn. Ant and bee societies were embraced by the natural theologians of the