We’re
all very familiar with ants and know that they are social creatures who live in
colonies. Some live in small colonies, some in large, and some in super
colonies. The Argentine is, apparently, the
place to study supercolonies. Here they occupy hundreds of square kilometers
with billions of ant citizens (1).
The
interesting thing about these supercolonies is, that as they spread out, they
indulge in constant warfare at their periphery and don’t deign to fraternize
(and thus interbreed) with their neighboring supercolonies. These are not collections of separate nests,
although the local density varies, but are one nation under, well, the sun. Of
course, carrying out a census is no mean feat as pointed out by Lester and Gruber
(2).
Now
Discovery News has picked up this work and focuses on the similarities between
these ant supercolonies and human societies (3). The thought out there is that
as humans live in societies consisting of millions on up to billions we have more things in common with ants than our
primate cousins as the latter live in small groups.
Why
does this matter? Well with huge societies there are lots of civic problems
such as long distance communication and transportation of goods, public health,
complex teamwork, animal domestication, slavery and warfare, to highlight a few
mentioned.
Apparently,
as Moffett observes, it is ants and humans that are the only two species to get into
“full-blown warfare”(3). The key to their success is their communication
system, which is chemically based, that is, the use of pheromones.
We,
of course, eschew our chemical heritage, masking it heavily with
antiperspirants, deodorants, perfumes and aftershaves, in favor of our
smartphones and social networks. One wonders why the ant colonies choose not to
interbreed so they don’t, like us, have the option to make love, not war. Maybe a good deodorant would help.
- M. W. Moffett, J. Behav. Ecol. (2012). DOI: 10.1093/beheco/ars043
- http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/04/13/beheco.ars048.extract?sid=7df3d554-3c93-4dde-a43f-d6f670aa35a
- http://news.discovery.com/human/humans-ant-colonies-120502.html
