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By Root 271 0

only in order to polish their armor, or to pester their slaves for a mouthful of honey. Without their servants these magnificent warriors, with their bronze armor, these superb shock-battalions, these irresistible veterans of great campaigns, are as impotent, as utterly helpless as so many suckling infants." In his 1954 book Ways of the Ant, John Crompton was similarly censorious: "Even if their slaves do not desert them, mental and physical decay will in itself and in its own time exterminate them. There must be many species of slave-making ants that have died out for this reason."

Although his language is rather histrionic, Maeterlinck was scientifically accurate, at least with regard to the obligate slave-making ants; in the early 1800s the great entomologist Pierre Huber had placed a group of ants of one of the slave-maker species in a kind of ant farm, along with honey to eat and some of their own pupae and larvae. Within a few days half had already died and the remainder were on the brink of starvation.

The raids themselves can be quite dramatic to witness. The species whose brood is being taken generally attempt to drag the pale, helpless larvae and pupae away from the nest, only to be pursued by the workers of the host ant species. Raids seem to be confined to certain times of the year, and at least some of the ants studied in this regard use cues from within the nest to decide when to begin raiding behavior. Slave making in ants is confined to temperate regions of the world, and scientists have suggested that the absence of seasons in the tropics explains the lack of raiding and, hence, slave-making behavior, since there is no internal signal that indicates when pupae can reliably be abducted from their nests. Some species also raid at certain times of day. Joan Herbers, a scientist at Ohio State University and an authority on such ants, says that when she was at Colorado State University her students knew exactly when to go looking for raids: "Jeremy [her student] could head to the hills of Colorado around 10 in the morning, knowing he would be done with fieldwork by 3 or 4." Others are not so reliable: "We have set up many experiments in the lab; some days they raid and other days they don't. Some days they raid fiercely and other days the raids fade away. Sometimes it takes an hour and other times 6–8. It's a pain, and has frustrated several journalists who have visited my lab."

In addition to studying the ants as a scientist, Herbers has questioned the wisdom and accuracy of the name slave-maker ants. She is not alone in this regard; Hölldobler and Wilson point out, "It is traditional to use the expression slavery for the exploitation of one species by another. In the human sense this is not slavery but more akin to the forcible domestication of dogs and cattle by humans." They go on to detail situations in which ants use the labor of others from the same species, but the term slavery is clearly limited in its applicability. Some entomologists use the more technical jargon term dulosis to refer to the process, whether within or across species, but most scientific journals still call it slave making.

Herbers is not just concerned about the use of the word slavery by scientists. She questions its suitability given its obvious connotations of human activity. At public lectures, she often is asked about the parallel between ant and human slavery, a parallel she always decries. She has come to the conclusion that we would all be better off abandoning the metaphor and terminology entirely, because of its emotionally loaded overtones. As an alternative, Herbers proposes the term pirate ant, since human pirates also make raids and steal cargo, often killing some of the victim ship's crew. Scientists could continue to discuss raiding parties, captives, and booty, without recourse to the loaded terms that certainly bring the public up short. I am in agreement with the distaste for the word slavery in nonhumans, and use it here only when the original authors use the term, so as not to rewrite their usage.

Regardless