The Pleasures Of: Episode 10

Ants

I cannot begin to tell you how much I love ants.

As a young Steve, I would spend hours watching them. Young, and not so young; and I remember all my brothers' friends mocking me for this. But I knew where all the colonies were in the backyard, and could still draw you a map of them today and tell you something of their history.

Would you like to hear it?

In the garden there was a large colony of Black Ants*. They lived in the west end, among the zinnias. Nearby was a colony of Brown Ants -- I mean the little and relatively cute sort, the ones that you often see warring on sidewalks in the early weeks of spring. One year I poked a bunch of holes into the ground and the brown ants took advantage of this, sending a raiding party agains the Blacks which gained them, as far as I could tell, only the shell of a potato bug.

The retaliation was swift and overwhelming. The Black Ants annihilated their brown cousins.

Summers past. The Black Ant colony thrived in their city among the zinnias. Their only enemies had been defeated; there were no threats nearby. And then the slavers came.

Slavers? I believe they are commonly called Amazons. They are red and slightly smaller than the Black Ants but extremely fierce. They have no worker caste, only soldiers, and are in fact incapable of rearing their own young or feeding themselves. So they subsist by invading another colony, killing the inhabitants and enslaving local workers.

They appeared in the driveway one summer, a column of thousands marching from the garden to the yard in which lived very small brown ants, let's call them Brownlings. They're little and unaggressive and they got their asses soundly kicked. Many colonies were overrun and their eggs brought home to--

To where? It seemed that they had taken over the Black Ant colony in the garden. But how could this be? I had seen no sign of battle.

I still don't know exactly what happened. But some days after their first appearance, the whole garden was covered by war, from the zinnias to the tomato plants some 30 feet away. (this is the human equivalent of I think 1 and a half miles. Holy crap). There were thousands of them, Black Ants and Amazons, or tens of thousands. The Black Ants fought with a courage and a tenacity I had not seen before, nor have I since. They defended their homelands against Amazons who swarmed them; and in the end they were killed, every last one, and their colony was destroyed. But in dying they may have saved others: Never again did the columns of red-shelled Amazon warriors march forth across the driveway, and the colony did not survive the Winter.

This was long ago.

I have an experience every Spring. I mentioned those brown ants earlier. So often I see them in April and May, fighting brutally against one another over cracks in the sidewalk. I stop always to look: No one has any idea why I am doing what I am doing, and I sense they don't even actually believe me when I tell them that I am watching a war between ants.

But is that the only reason I like them? Because they fight gruesome wars with one another?

Surely not.

Here is my suspicion about ants.

They evolved from wasps who lived in houses, but were mostly solitary. Over time the wasp nests became more complex; all but the queens and the males lost their wings; and contemporary ant society appeared. This is what the fossil record tells me.

Here's what I think happened:

The Wasps formed a relatively stable, Jeffersonian democracy of yeoman farmers, living in their quasi-solitary houses, killing spiders for their young. Over time, new ideas evolved about society and the role of the individual; simultaneously, new technologies of body modification were developed. The nature of work was called into question, as was the value of independence and the need for sexual reproduction.

Using advanced technologies, the majority of the population was rendered sterile. Through implants in their brains they were set to carrying out various tasks. Males, it was decided, were best used to facilitate sex; they had had little interest in much else anyway, and it did not take much technological tweaking to enhance this drive and to cause the males to die after its fulfillment. Only one breeding female, it was decided, was necessary in a given city; her grotesque, bloated body could handle the egg-laying for an entire small nation.

Time passed. The ants learned how to code the construction of their various technologies into their own DNA, so that their own cells produced the nanobots which had previously needed to be surgically implantsd. And eventually, what happened? The rulers died away, or perhaps forgot their own existence, which is most likely, and what remained? But an endlessly self-justifying population of slaves. Slaves without a master, forever serving for the purpose of serving.

This is one thought. Another: Contained within an ant colony is as much grey matter as in a human brain. They aren't smart, but collectively they are. Do they think? Does the colony think, ponder?

Does a mass have a soul?

What does that mean for us?

Either way, I think they're neat. And I'm old enough now that if anybody makes fun of me for staring at ants in the garden instead of smoking pot or playing football, I will punch them in their goddamn face!




*I usually prefer not to know these species' actual names, and don't in most cases; it's so much more interesting to understand their behavior and not only understand them as a label applied by a central institution somewhere. The Black Ants I'm talking about here are about a quarter inch long and live in relatively large colonies, they're all black, but they're not as big as the ones you see living in trees.