In September,
scientists at the University of Hong Kong published the most complete census of
ants ever assembled. The numbers are so big as to seem made up. The study
estimated that there are at least 20 quadrillion — that is,
20,000,000,000,000,000 — ants on Earth. That is about 2.5 million ants for
every human. And because the study relied on a conservative estimate for ants
that live in trees and did not include subterranean ants, the census is almost
certainly an undercount.
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“I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually turns out to
be an order of magnitude higher,” Sabine Nooten, an author of the study, told
The New York Times.
The numbers floored me. Like perhaps every kid, I
went through a period of intense childhood obsession with ants, spending
endless summer afternoons in the backyard observing the mystery and majesty of
ant life — how unbelievably many there were, how elegantly they organized
themselves, how terrifically busy they all seemed.
What has always beguiled me about ants is how their
similarities to humanity — they live in societies, they have all got jobs, and
they endure arduous daily commutes to work — are offset by incomprehensible
alienness. So much of ant life makes no sense to us: there is the abject
selflessness, the subsuming of the individual to the collective. There is the
absence of any leadership or coordination, their lives dictated by instinct and
algorithm, out of which emerges collective intelligence. There is the way they
navigate and communicate through chemical signals, creating road signs from
pheromones and never getting stuck in traffic jams.
But the quadrillion ant census got me thinking about
ants in a way I had not before — as a social species not just remarkably
different from our own but one that is in many ways unquestionably superior.
Ants, I keep thinking, are an example for humanity
to emulate. Over tens of millions of years of evolution, ants have figured out
how to become astonishingly numerous without depleting the world around them.
Indeed, just the opposite is true: because they provide so many important
functions to their habitats, they are “the little things that run the world”,
as the great sociobiologist and ant enthusiast E.O. Wilson once wrote about
ants and other invertebrates.
It is natural, as a human, to slip into thinking of
our species as somehow special. By many objective measures, though, ants are
far more consequential to life on Earth than we are. Wilson pointed out that if
people were to disappear, little about the world would change for the worse; if
ants and other invertebrates did, nearly everything would suffer. Ants aerate
soil, transport seeds, and aid in decomposition; their mounds serve as dense
nutrient oases that are a foundation for a wide range of life. Given their
centrality to life on the planet, not to mention their teeming populations,
should not we think more highly of ants? They are among the most sophisticated
and successful life-forms ever to crawl the earth.
Over tens of millions of years of evolution, ants have figured out how to become astonishingly numerous without depleting the world around them.
Humans are, of course, smarter and bigger than ants,
and in the past 300,000 years or so of our species’ reign, we have conquered
the planet and commandeered its resources to a degree perhaps unmatched in the
history of life. But compared with those of ants and other social insects —
bees, termites and some wasps — our record is a hilarious blip.
Ants have been around for 140 million years. They
are a dominant feature — often some of the primary ecosystem engineers — of
nearly every land-based ecosystem on Earth. And they are the true inventors of
what we think of as several quintessentially human endeavors.
Ants have been farming for at least 60 million
years. Leafcutter ants, for instance, forage for vegetation, which they use to
grow crops of a fungus that they have domesticated for their exclusive use.
Other ants maintain herds of aphids that feed on the sap of plants; the ants
then “milk” the aphids of their sugar-rich secretions. Ants are master
architects as well, formidable warriors that can also maintain peace through
strength and even engage in compromise and a kind of democracy.
Ants are not always good neighbors. But even when
they are ecologically destructive, they have much to teach us about
cooperation. Over the past century or so, the Argentine ant, an invasive
species that hitched rides with humans to spread from South America to much of
the rest of the world, has dominated the globe by forming a surprising and
perhaps evolutionarily novel organizational structure: the supercolony.
These are massive colonies of ants in which
individuals mix freely among different nests spread across huge distances. The
ants do so because, in their adaptation to their new lands, they dramatically
reduced their aggressiveness, allowing for much bigger collectives. One
supercolony of Argentine ants spans nearly 6,400km from Italy to Spain. It is
“the largest cooperative unit ever recorded”, to quote one study.
This sort of social flexibility is a key part of
ants’ success. It is hard to imagine that in a few million years, humans will
still be among the planet’s dominant life-forms. Ants, though? Their antics are
sure to endure.
In a paper published this year, ecologists Catherine
Parr and Tom Bishop suggested that even climate change, our species’ great
stain on the planet, might not prove a great calamity to ants, whose social
structure will allow them to “ride out environmental changes to a much greater
degree than solitary organisms”.
Which, really, is no surprise. Ants were here before us, and
they are likely to long outlast us. They run the place. We are just visiting.
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