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Ants
Copyright 1995 by Edward Willett
I spent the Labour Day weekend at the home of
some friends at Crooked Lake. The weather was beautiful and so was their yard,
and so we ate lunch outdoors, observing and being observed by cats, humming
birds, bees, butterflies, hawks--and ants.
Of all of them, it was the ants who were
most interested in our activities, for reasons which became obvious as I
watched one after another cart away a prize crumb of bread or cheese,
many times larger than itself. Ants are pretty amazing, I thought...but
until I did a little research, I had no idea how amazing.
There are approximately 8,800 known
species of ants, and possible two or three times that
many that have never been identified. It's estimated that there are a
billion billion insects on Earth at any one moment, and approximately
one in 100 is an ant; that means there is a standing population of 10
million billion ants in the world, weighing in at roughly 900 million
kilograms--10 percent of the weight of all land animals put together.
More fascinating than their numbers is
their social life. Ants form huge colonies (the size and exact
composition depending on the species), in which every ant serves a
specialized function and does so perfectly, all without any direction
from above.
Although ant colonies do have a
"queen", she's no more the "leader" of the colony
than--well, than Queen Elizabeth is the political leader of Canada.
She's just one more highly specialized ant, with the most important
function of all: making new ants.
It's almost a misnomer to speak of
"individual" ants, because the true ant organism is the
colony. Just as our bodies have organs designed for specific tasks, so
the ant colony has "organs" made up of specific kinds of ants.
Foragers are like arms, reaching out into the surrounding countryside to
find food for the colony. Soldiers are like teeth and claws, protecting
the colony from its enemies. And the queen is the organism's
reproductive organ.
The variations that ants have wrought on
this theme range from the relatively
simple to the enormously complex. In the latter category, consider the
40 known species of leaf-cutter ant.
Leaf-cutters are farmers, raising tasty
fungus on pulped bits of leaf. They have a specialized caste for every
required task in the process. Large workers with powerful jaws climb
shrubs and trees and bring back bits of leaves. Smaller workers chop the
fragments into smaller pieces, and successively smaller workers further
reduce the fragments into pulp, which are added to a large, spongy mass
of decaying vegetation on which they plant their edible fungus. Not only
that, they weed out unsuitable bits of fungus that may also grow in the
"garden," cultivate the fungus they do want, and then
distribute it to the other members of the colony. The big ants that
forage for leaves are too large to care for the fungus, while the little
ants that care for the fungus are too small to cut leaves. Only by
working together can they succeed.
And succeed they have. Some species of
leaf-cutter ants create colonies with
more than a million workers, with chambers and galleries reaching six
metres underground. In the tropics of the western hemisphere, they
consume more vegetation than mammals,
caterpillar or beetles.
Ants' social organization is maintained
by the ants' ability to communicate
to each other via pheromones, chemicals that can be sensed by other
ants. Specific chemicals call ants
out of the nest to scavenge when a rich new source of food is found;
cause them to swarm to the defense of the nest (crushing the head of
many species of ants releases a
pheromone that will make soldier ants come swarming); help ants recognize
other ants from their nest, and so on.
Ants are not humans, and ant colonies are
not really parallels of human societies. (Thank goodness; we've got
enough of the attitude that "anyone not of my kind is the
enemy" without carrying it to the absolute extremes that ants do,
who will attempt to expel or destroy any foreign creature or object that
enters their territory.) Yet ants do instinctively what we most praise
in humans: devote their lives to the good of their fellows. It's hard
not to appreciate that.
And the success that ants have achieved
without intelligence or leaders makes you wonder why our own societies
have such struggles when we, supposedly, boast both.
Think about that, the next time ants
appear at your picnic.
These weekly columns on science appear in the Regina
(Saskatchewan) Leader Post and Red Deer (Alberta) Advocate.. They are
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