Ever since I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with ants. As a child, the concept of a group of insects cooperating to achieve tasks that an individual insect could never accomplish mesmerized me. Just so I don’t sound like I’m posturing here, at the same time I was also picking my nose a lot and laughing at farts, so there’s that.
To this day, eusocial insects hold a special place in my mind. They are little collective groups that are so much like our own, human cooperative cultures. You can’t build a car on your own from scratch, but thanks to division of labor, you can get a job and make enough money to buy a car that is made by thousands of other people. That kind of specialization is only found in one other group of creatures on our planet: eusocial animals.
The thing that boggles my little mind is that eusocial insects are born with these instructions pre-programmed. They don’t learn how to harvest or how to soldier, they don’t learn how to gather nectar from flowers or tend to the queen, they just do it. One queen produces all of the castes necessary for colony survival. Every time I look at eusocial animals, even to this day, the two words that constantly go through my mind are holy shit.
So, I’d always wanted to write about them. I touch on eusocial structure with the Quyth from my stories THE CRYPT and the GFL series, but I’d never got down and dirty with the awesomeness that is ants.
My good friend J.C. Hutchins, a talented novelist and podcaster, wrote a fantastic, modern-day scifi series called 7th SON. To promote this series he created an anthology of stories set in the 7th SON timeline, titled 7th SON: OBSIDIAN. He asked me to contribute, and I was in.
In the 7th SON timeline, there is a major terrorist event on US soil. I won’t tell you what it is, because I hate spoilers, but it is a spectacular and ballsy thing to do in a thriller story. The storyline involves a major power company, Rookman Oil, so I took advantage of the opportunity to create a story that had been in my mind for many years—using leafcutter ants as biofuel harvesters.
I am fascinated with the idea of self-replication for industrial purposes. If we can make something that makes copies of itself from scratch, and this something produces a valuable raw material, then we have a nearly infinite potential to create a self-renewing supply of that raw material. We already do this to some extent with bees and honey.
As you saw in the story, leafcutter ants harvest plant material, use that material to cultivate a crop of specialized fungus, then eat a by-product of that fungus. Ants farm, for crying out loud. Awesome! If we could tweak the ants to eat a high-energy plant material, then tweak the fungus to produce a byproduct that is suitable for the creation of biodiesel, then boom—you have completely cut humans harvesting that crop and converting it into crude from the production cycle.
I’d had that idea for quite some time, and in 2009 was able to buckle down and turn it into a chomp-chomp story for Hutchins. Since then, I’ve been pleased and excited to see that this idea has real traction in the energy industry. Well, sort of. Scientists are studying how plant material breaks down inside of the ant colony, and also examining several species of fungus in hopes of finding one that does exactly what I talk about in ESUOCIAL NETWORKING. So far, I haven’t seen anyone apply the concept of actually using the leafcutter ants to do the collection work, but I think it is a real possibility.
It comes down to the concepts of scale and expense. Can humans harvest more crops than ants? Yes, of course, but there are associated costs of equipment and labor. If you could get ants or other insects to do the harvesting, your primary labor force costs nothing—no wages, no healthcare, no union dues, etc. Ants don’t need holidays or lunch breaks. Ants just work: all day, every day. You’d still need people for crop cultivation, of course, but the amount of ant colonies that could be seeded for harvesting is potentially limited only by the amount of available food: the crop you are planting and cultivating.
To sum it up, this is one of my favorite stories. I have some cool concepts wrapped up in a science gone horribly wrong format, tied together by fun characters.
I enjoyed writing it, and I hope you enjoyed reading it.