Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration [1994] by Edward O. Wilson Bert Hölldobler

Author:Edward O. Wilson, Bert Hölldobler [Wilson, Edward O.; Hölldobler, Bert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: DCC 595.79/6, LCC QL568.F7 H575
Publisher: Birkhäuser Verlag/Springer
Published: 1994-08-05T04:00:00+00:00

The size of ants and the colonies they form - the superorganisms - vary enormously. An entire colony of Brachymyrmex from South America (a worker of which is shown peeking from behind the antenna of a Bornean carpenter ant Camponotus gigas) would fit into the head of the larger ant. (Scanning electron micrograph by Ed Seling.) [Page 108]

The driver-ant superorganism: a foraging swarm of Dorylus driver ants in East Africa. (Drawing by Katherine Brown-Wing.) [Page 109]

ameba across a hundred yards of ground. A closer look reveals it to comprise a mass of several million workers running in concert from the subterranean nest, an irregular network of tunnels and chambers dug into the soil. As the column emerges, it first resembles an expanding sheet and then metamorphoses into a treelike formation, with the trunk growing from the nest, the crown an advancing front the width of a small house, and numerous anastomosing branches connecting the two. The swarm is leaderless. The workers rush back and forth near the front at an average speed of 4 centimeters per second. Those in the van press forward for a short distance and then turn back into the tumbling mass to give way to other advance runners. The feeder columns, resembling thick black ropes lying along the ground, are in reality angry rivers of ants coming and going. The frontal swarm, advancing at 20 meters an hour, engulfs all the ground and low vegetation in its path, gathering and killing almost all the insects and even snakes and other larger animals unable to crawl away. (Once in a great while the victims include a human infant left unattended.) After a few hours the direction of flow is reversed, and the column drains backward into the nest holes.

To speak of a colony of driver ants or other social insects as more than just a tight aggregation of individuals is to speak of a superorganism, and therefore to invite a detailed comparison between the society and a conventional organism. The idea - the dream - of the superorganism was extremely popular in the early part of this century. William Morton Wheeler, like many of his contemporaries, returned to it repeatedly in his writings. In his celebrated 1911 essay, “The Ant Colony as an Organism,” he stated that the animal colony is really an organism and not merely the analog of one. It behaves, he said, as a unit. It possesses distinctive properties of size, behavior, and organization that are transmitted from colony to colony and from one generation to the next. The queen is the reproductive organ, the workers the supporting brain, heart, gut, and other tissues. The exchange of liquid food among the colony members is the equivalent of the circulation of blood and lymph.

Wheeler and other theorists of his day knew they were on to something important. Their voice was also within the idiom of science. Few succumbed to the mysticism of Maurice Maeterlinck’s “spirit of the [Page 110] hive,” a transcendent force that somehow emerges from, or perhaps guides, or drives, the communion of the insects.

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