conclusion four ways of looking at an ant
We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. . . . If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
GEORGE ELIOT, MIDDLEMARCH (1874)
Ants fascinate me as individuals, and I have developed the patience to watch a single worker for an entire day. Yet to focus on the peculiarities of an individual ant is to miss the forest for the trees. Ants, in a sense, are their colonies. In recognition of this, I have explored, at various points in this book, three additional ways of looking at ants. These perspectives may be expressed as analogies: the ant colony is like a human society; the ant colony is like an organism; and the ant colony is like a mind. But before revisiting these, let’s consider the single ant.
THE FIRST WAY: THE ANT AS AN INDIVIDUAL
On my belly in a field near my home in the village of Greenport, Long Island, I spy a worker of the Allegheny mound ant, Formica exsectoides. I approach carefully, anticipating from her dance-like movements what she might do next. The tilt of her head and the rigidity of her legs reveal her focus on the task before her (seeking prey, I decide). I recognize instantly when my presence becomes a distraction. She turns, tenses. Her antennae sweep in my direction, her mandibles gaping. I back off until she settles down. As I watch, by reflex I interpret the ant’s actions in terms of her intentions, even her feelings, much as I would a dog’s, or another human’s.
When she first noticed me, had she felt afraid? Angry? Threatened? Murderous? Perhaps instead she was incapable of having feelings. Was she more like a machine, simply responding to stimuli in a predictable way?
It’s easy for us to think of ants as robots, because we judge other creatures against the standard of what we see in ourselves. Anthropocentrism, the belief that humans are unique or central to the universe, has been challenged by scientists as far back as Copernicus.1 And just as we make assumptions about other people based on their outward appearance—“The human body is the best picture of the human soul,” writes Ludwig Wittgenstein—so we impute consciousness to other beings based on the expressiveness of their bodies, particularly their faces.2 It’s their segmented bodies and masklike faces that lead us to assume that ants do not have “human” qualities of character or intelligence.
But the astonishing truth is that the brains and central nervous systems of ants and human beings share closer evolutionary ties than was once believed.3 In light of this, I disagree with one conclusion of the author who intrigued me with his superorganism ideas when I was a student. Lewis Thomas writes in The Lives of a Cell that an ant “can’t be imagined to have a mind at all, much less a thought.”4 I think it likely there is a mind in there, striving to understand the few things her genetic endowments allow her to. Is she intelligent? To my way of thinking, yes. We know a worker can evaluate the living space, ceiling height, entry dimensions, cleanliness, and illumination of a potential new home for her colony—a masterly feat, considering that she’s a roving speck with no pen, paper, or calculator.
If ants possess intelligence, do they also possess personalities? Can we think of an individual ant as being somehow unique? It is true that an ant’s caste or role in the colony limits the actions and choices that are available to her. But does it follow that, say, all minor workers of the marauder ant are interchangeable? Not necessarily. Other animals exhibit no greater variety of behaviors than do ants, even such vertebrates as the lions, tigers, and bears that we might think of as having personality. But personality is more subtle than what we can discern from simply counting and categorizing behaviors.5 We pass above ants at airplane height, relative to the insect’s size. Use a magnifier, become as intimate with the subject as Goodall was with Flo, Flint, and her other chimpanzees, and it’s possible to notice much more.
At different times I have picked out, by quirks of movement and appearance, what I am confident is the same worker from a marauder ant swarm that I had observed an hour or a day before. Theory suggests that such distinct personas develop most readily in large ant colonies, where individual ants are less obliged to take on a range of responsibilities and have more opportunities to prefer a certain task and even perfect it through repetition, much like humans learning a trade suitable for city life. This process, combined with any hardwired caste differences, may have repercussions at the colony level, resulting in increased labor specialization that enhances the versatility of the colony; such specialization and versatility are expected to be general characteristics of large societies.6 Still, I find individual ants are easier to distinguish when nests are tiny. Just as with students in a small classroom, I can quickly identify the slackers and the overachievers (the latter are known as colony elites, when drudges might be a better term).7 So-called key individuals take on most of the labor, and in some situations serve as a catalyst, stimulating others to join in. They may be the first to notice that a job needs to be done, just as the same person may always wash the dishes piling in the sink before their spouse gets around to them. Remove an elite, and productivity plummets. Sound familiar? The same thing happens in any office, factory, ball team, or family.
THE SECOND WAY: THE ANT COLONY AS A SOCIETY
Wherever we notice parallels between ant colonies and our own societies, we should remember that the ant societies came first. Ants formed coordinated labor forces of expert homemakers and superb soldiers millions of years before we came on the scene. The leafcutters invented agriculture eons before we did. The army ants have long outdone Attila the Hun. No wonder there has been a tendency since King Solomon not only to empathize with ants, but also to view them as diminutive versions of ourselves.8 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Zeus transforms an army of ants into a horde of human warriors. The poet describes these warriors, the Myrmidons, as
True to their origin. You have seen their bodies,
And they still have their customary talents,
Industry, thrift, endurance; they are eager
For gain, and never easily relinquish
What they have won.9
Just as humans lend their ears to friends, relations, and countrymen, ants are responsive, largely by means of chemical signals, first and foremost to nestmates. They, like us, are the descendants of successful cooperators, and their pursuits are largely social. The commonalities between ants and people are striking. Both alter nature to build nurseries, fortresses, stockyards, and highways, while nurturing friends and livestock and obliterating enemies and vermin. Both ants and humans express tribal bonds and basic needs through ancient, elaborate codes. Both create universes of their own devising through the scale of their domination of the environment. As inveterate organizers, ants and people face similar problems in obtaining and distributing resources, allocating labor and effort, preserving civil unity, and defending communities against outside forces. But compared to humans, ants perform these tasks with a single-minded savagery, and they use anatomical and behavioral tools unique to their size and insect ancestry. Moreover, while human traditions pass from one generation to the next largely by social mechanisms, ants encode their colony’s social systems primarily in their genes.
The variation in size and scale of ant populations matches that of people, from the handful of individuals in a readily movable band to several tens of millions in a vast city. It turns out to be possible to look at an Acanthognathos trapjaw ant colony of a few ants nesting in a twig using the paradigms that anthropologists apply to hunter-gatherers, and to examine megalopolises such as those of weaver ants the way a sociologist would study a human city-state.10 Mature ant societies exhibit many of the same interrelated trends observed in both increasingly complex and increasingly populous human societies: a faster tempo of life and correspondingly higher information flow; more complex and nuanced communications; greater regulation and control of the environment; declining individual self-reliance and more specialization; a growing tendency for populations to subdivide into teams and form assembly lines and other labor crews; greater surpluses of energy, food, and labor; amplified risk-taking and the emergence of large-scale warfare; and the inception of social mechanisms unknown and unnecessary in small communities, such as elaborate infrastructure, efficient mass transit, and even features of a market economy, such as the collection and distribution of goods for consumers based on popularity and need.
Beyond the similarities, I have tried in this book to point out ways in which ant societies perform better than ours. The ant’s self-sacrifice can be a little frightening; we have seen how readily the workers of some ant societies put themselves at risk and even condemn themselves to death when it serves the interests of the colony. Also, the lack of centralized control and the redundancy of operations in ant communities allow for fast responses to local situations and social continuity even when individuals make errors or die.11 These features also make it more difficult for parasites, predators, and competitors to bring down an ant society (in contrast, human terrorists can find easy targets in key buildings and leaders). Human hunter-gatherers and some of the earliest farming communities appear to have had a similar egalitarian social structure, without hereditary commanders. That’s because members of these societies were unlikely to accumulate resources and wealth, and therefore power, so that leadership, when it emerged at all, was weak and fluid, and easily trounced by the collective will of the group.12 As in some ant societies, there could even have been several leaders at a time, but they led by example, never by decree.
An Acanthognathus trapjaw ant colony lodged within a single twig in Costa Rica. The workers, like those of most ant species with small colonies, are slow, methodical, and capable of working independently.
Ants along the trail of a large Crematogaster nest in Ghana. In ant species with large mature colonies, workers tend to move fast, constantly gather information from nestmates, and rely more on joint action.
After five millennia in which despots have ruled civilizations around the world, the rise of modern democracies with systems of checks and balances represents, in a sense, a return to the ant style of governance, yet we remain dependent on hierarchies of political power. Some argue that the Internet and cell phones have enabled people everywhere to reexert collective influence over their societies, however. Without the bottlenecks that hamper bureaucracies, networks of people can handle masses of data and act on them more efficiently, like the community of scientists who weed through all the published ideas on a topic to find and follow up on the best few.13 “Smart mobs,” communicating, for example, with text messages, have disseminated ideas and combated fraud with almost antlike speed, even among people who don’t know each other well.14 Such “weak ties”—wide-ranging connections that take us beyond the tight-knit groups we interact with regularly—are likely of special importance in organizing both ants and people.15
Has this collective mode of organization improved the quality of life for the industrious ant? Measured by longevity, it certainly has for the queens: successful ones can live for many years, especially those belonging to species in which a single queen rears a large colony. For ant workers, however, existence appears to be “poore, nasty, brutish, and short,” to borrow a phrase used by seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes—a matter of weeks to a couple of years. Individuals who engage in lower-risk behaviors, such as the replete workers who store food in their bodies, tend to live the longest. And yet, despite the cannon-fodder expendability of some members of large colonies, their life spans are still an improvement over those of other insects the size of an ant.16
THE THIRD WAY: THE ANT COLONY AS AN ORGANISM
Many ancient peoples likened their settlements to the anatomy of the human body. The Greeks reformulated this view as the body politic, a likeness between the body and the state, and from these comparisons the idea of the superorganism was born.17 While the bedlam of modern human societies can make the idea of a body politic seem strained, an ant colony does often seem to act as an individual, once you get to know it. I have detected differences in temperament between marauder ant societies, with one nest appearing more aggressive or hardworking than another. Researchers have trained whole colonies of the British ant Leptothorax albipennis to be more proficient at migrating to new nests: the workers learn collectively, after repeated practice, perhaps in part by improving their individual performances and in part by interacting more effectively with their fellows.18
Some parallels to organisms are easy to see: ant colonies can be like human bodies, composed of nonreproducing workers that sustain the whole (equivalent to the somatic cells that compose the organs of the human body, such as the lungs and the heart) and a permanent reproductive queen that produces the next generation (like the human body’s ovaries and testes).19
Still, people who see the resemblance between ant and human societies often find the similarities between a colony and an organism less apparent. Certainly a colony is a kind of individual, in the same way that a university is one entity even when it occupies many buildings. But most of us think of an organism as an integrated being with a body of a specific size and shape. A colony, which may seem nothing more than a scattered assemblage of ants, lacks this feature—but then so do organisms such as mats of fungi or ivy, which grows in a rambling manner and, as it turns out, reproduces flexibly—budding flowers here and there something like an Argentine ant colony with its ongoing production of new queens.20
It’s easiest to grasp the likeness of an ant colony to a simple organism, such as a freshwater Volvox, which contains up to fifty thousand cells arranged in a sphere that can reach the size of a small ant. Some of the cells are big and capable of reproduction, but the majority of them are tiny and sterile. These sterile cells, like worker ants, collaborate to transport nutrients and work dynamically as a team, much as marauder ants do around prey, to move the sphere toward or away from light. Smaller and simpler still, because it has no differentiated sexual cells—or any other clear labor specialization—is the species Eudorina elegans, another swimming organism that is able to perform most of the same coordinated activities as Volvox, and even, like an ant colony that develops as the workers gradually emerge, goes through a simple embryonic transformation.21
Volvox and Eudorina are composed of just one or two cell types, but the human body is made up of more than two hundred varieties of cells. Complexity—usually measured by this kind of division of labor—generally increases as size increases, whether the organisms in question are individuals composed of cells or societies made up of ants. Most small colonies, like the Acanthognathus nests I collected in Costa Rica, have a single worker type, but a marauder ant colony, reaching a much greater size, contains a number of worker castes, including categories differentiated by both size and age. Similarly, while people in a nomadic hunter-gatherer society are essentially nonspecialists, today even a midsized town has dozens of job descriptions, and Manhattan has hundreds. The more jobs there are, the more the members of a society begin to function like tissues in a living organism, by being assembled into social networks and work groups.
Why is this so? For a small organism or group, specialization is typically unnecessary, and it might even be dangerous: with excessive division of labor, a few deaths could wipe out all the specialists, leaving jobs undone. On the other hand, a large organism or group has to have specialists for the same reasons it usually requires more intricate methods of communication and transportation: processing and distributing resources is logistically complex for a larger populace spread over a wider and more varied space. Even so, the number of specialties is always smaller than the number of chores to be done. Whether it be in colonies, cities, or organisms, creating an expert or team is complicated and expensive. Every new function must be coordinated with the others, which, in bigger, more complex bodies and groups, can require a lot of retooling.22 Argentine ants, for one, get away with very little worker specialization despite their prodigious colony sizes.
THE FOURTH WAY: THE ANT COLONY AS A MIND
A superorganism is able to gather and use information. Like a computer, which uses segments of code to handle chunks of data, and brains, which use neurons, the colony assigns information processing to subunits, the workers. In each case the subunits are simple and redundant, which allows the whole to function even with sloppiness and local failure. The ability to process information, however, is not the same as consciousness. Neither computers nor ant colonies need consciousness to make smart choices. We have seen, for example, that individually ignorant workers are able, as a group, to select the closest or richest source of food, without any individual knowing a choice was made. In a way, the group as a whole could be said to be thinking. Cognition, of course, is hard to assess, even in big-brained vertebrates.23 Still, it seems likely that an ant colony is more like a human mind than may at first be evident. Brains consist of neurons that, like ants, interact without direction from a central authority; thoughts emerge from these interactions in what consciousness expert Marvin Minsky describes as “a society of mind.”24
But while the neuron occupies a fixed position and is capable only of simple responses—it functions like an on/off switch in a machine—each individual ant processes a lot of information, communicates with coworkers using an assortment of signals, performs labor, may specialize, and moves around. Does mobility give a collection of ants an advantage over the neurons in a brain? We have seen that engineers have had success with swarm-bots, groups of simple robots that self-organize like ants do to solve complex problems, such as recruiting to resources.25 But for processing data, such mobility can be a drawback. The all-but-hardwired communication channels between neurons in the brain allow simple messages to convey complex meanings. A worker ant, if we consider her as a subunit of the collective mind, has to convey more generic information to be understood by the ever-changing workers around her.
Even accounting for their body size, ant workers have small brains when compared to mammals.26 Still, a large nest has no shortage of processing power. The nerve cells of an army ant colony, distributed among a million or more bodies, easily outnumber those in the human cerebral cortex. However, while the superorganism may deploy a kind of swarm intelligence, with workers responding quickly to conditions at a local level, the flow of information through a whole system of roaming bodies can be slow and imprecise.27 It’s no wonder ant colonies have never been able to invent calculus or write a symphony.
Of course, humans can function extraordinarily well both individually and collectively, so our species can produce both Beethoven and the San Francisco Symphony. There can be elements of the “emergent brain” in the synergy between musicians playing a sonata. When we brainstorm with others, we are engaging in the same kind of activity that ants do when they collectively decide to focus on the closest or richest food source, and in some cases a group reaches a viable solution to a problem that no individual would have dreamed up.28
Despite their refined ability to work together, ants do not always live in harmony. There can be discord, most commonly over reproductive rights.29 Typically the largest mature colonies show the least obvious internal friction and the most violence toward outsiders; consider the Argentine ant supercolonies, with their disciplined yet expendable armies of billions. The situation is reversed in small societies. A hundred or so species, most of them belonging to the ponerine group, have a fluid division of labor, even in sex, with multiple queens that are not clearly distinguishable from workers, or workers that can act as queens.30 These societies don’t exactly have traitors, but they do experience domestic strife. The Diacamma ants, for example, have no distinct queen. A mated worker gnaws off tiny growths on the backs of her nestmates, a mutilation that demotes these “marked for life” individuals into non-egg-laying foragers, whose ovaries shrink. Fights ensue following the death of this gamergate “queen” until a new one emerges.31
In some ponerine species, those individuals most physiologically ready to be queen can take over the queen’s role when she dies; with this comes the danger of being mistaken for a potential competitor to the queen while she is still alive, and being harried or killed. The colonies of such species are virtual police states, in which ants root out nestmates with the potential to become egg layers.32 This type of persecution is rare when workers and queens are so different in their morphologies that the queens can monopolize reproduction. Marauder ant workers, for example, lack ovaries altogether and therefore have no prospects for procreation. Differentiation of this kind accelerates the continued evolution of differences between workers and queens, resulting in adaptations that streamline efficiency within the workforce. In some species this has allowed for colony growth into the many thousands and beyond, as has been the case for the central characters of this book. But even species with a distinct queen caste aren’t immune from conflict: when a colony has multiple queens, they may fight each other or (as we saw in the Argentine ant) be culled by workers.
Comparing ant colonies with human societies, organisms, and minds may give us insights into the question of conflict among ants. It turns out that resolving discord is a feature of biology at every level. Our own bodies are sites of strife, much of it imperceptible to us. “The unity of the organism is an approximation,” write evolutionary biologists Austin Burt and Robert Trivers.
The genes in an organism sometimes “disagree” over what should happen. That is, they appear to have opposing effects. In animals, for example, some genes may want (or act as if they want) a male to produce lots of healthy sperm, but other genes in the same male want half the sperm to be defective. Some genes in a female want her to nourish all her embryos; others want her to abort half of them. Some genes in a fetus want it to grow quickly, others slowly, and yet others at an intermediate level. Some genes want it to become a male, others a female.33
Often conflict can be a useful tool. Neurobiologists find that even our thoughts emerge from a cacophony of competing mental elements.34 The vigilance of ponerine workers against upstarts, for example, resembles the way humans have wielded power through political oversight. Citizens in a democracy may vehemently express opinions over a controversial issue yet reach a collective decision by casting votes; as we’ve seen, worker ants use a voting system called quorum sensing to reach a decision about where to nest.
Nevertheless, whereas ponerines like Diacamma can be abundant and successful, the nestmates of most ant species lead less contentious lives. We do not yet know if equanimity is essential for ants to develop large-scale societies. Instead, it may be that a worker is so unlikely to profit from conflict in a large society that social discord all but disappears, bred out over time from the choices that individuals can make. After all, when the worker is just one among thousands, what are the chances that she will take over the queen’s role? It could also be that subversive behaviors exist in large colonies but are harder for human observers to recognize. For example, workers of some species, though never mated, can surreptitiously lay unfertilized eggs, which develop into male ants.35
Dissension among its ranks and simple organization notwithstanding, even a ponerine colony can be viewed as a superorganism. We’ve seen that while organisms may look like harmonious beings, conflict can be part of any healthy body. And while most familiar living things are complex, there exist simple organisms without division of labor or sophisticated communications; judging from Eudorina elegans, whose cells live and die as a single generation, even a clear separation of reproductive duties is not absolutely required. What all organisms do possess in common with all ant colonies, however, is that the parts are tied absolutely to the whole: no ant, not even a ponerine worker persecuted by her nestmates, has the option to get up and leave. It’s the unbreakable binding force of their shared group identity that makes the colonies of all ant species superorganisms.36
That said, the marauder ant, certain army ants, and the Argentine ant (and perhaps some other invasive species) represent clear pinnacles of superorganism biology, showing the most parallels to biological organisms. These species lack the weaver ants’ versatile social exchanges and the leafcutter ants’ intricate organizational skills—but then so do the cells of such simple organisms as Eudorina elegans and Volvox. What they exhibit strongly is an integration in which the individual ant, as the basic subunit of the superorganism, exhibits a minimal degree of autonomy. She is incapable of learning much on her own, and never wanders more than an inch or two from her sisters. Yet the coordinated feats of the whole colony are remarkable. Despite the fact that army ants don’t build permanent nests, but rather rest en masse, often exposed to the elements, the collective body of interlinked workers is as well regulated and homeostatic as the body of a warm-blooded mammal. In one species, the metabolism and spacing of workers keep a colony’s temperature to within a degree or so of 83.5 degrees Fahrenheit.37
Army ant colonies also have a very low rate of reproduction, investing heavily in one large offspring at a time; this ensures that colonies are as well formed from the start as a newborn mammal.38 Army ants even manage to forgo the infrastructure that keeps most large societies rooted in place and wander the environment with an agility unusual for such a massive social group. As a result of their cohesion, these ants in particular come closest to attaining what the Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck described as a “masked power, sovereignly wise.” Of the honeybee, a species that has achieved a similar level of coordination, Maeterlinck asked in 1901, “What is this ‘spirit of the hive’—where does it reside?”
It comes to pass with bees as with most of the things in this world; we remark some few of their habits; we say they do this, they work in such and such fashion, their queens are born thus, their workers are virgin, they swarm at a certain time. And then we imagine we know them, and ask nothing more. . . . Their life seems very simple to us, and bounded, like every life, by the instinctive cares of reproduction and nourishment. But let the eye draw near, and endeavour to see; and at once the least phenomenon of all becomes overpoweringly complex; we are confronted by the enigma of intellect, of destiny, will, aim, means, causes; the incomprehensible organization of the most insignificant act of life.39
Maeterlinck’s enigmas arise by means both simpler and more universal than he could have imagined. Recent investigations across the sciences and humanities are in fact proving how commonalities among colonies, cities, organisms, and minds run deep, with principles and constraints operating in a similar manner whether we look at a cell, a brain, a body, or a superorganism.40 At each level the system exhibits a personal identity and a separateness from outsiders. Each system requires a means of distributing energy, nutrients, and information, and of removing waste.
What most excites me are the unexpected insights that emerge from comparisons between these different levels of organization. In the study of ants, our insights thus far have been limited by the visual prominence of individual workers: imagine trying to grasp the totality of a person and being overwhelmed by the sight of neurons and blood cells. I expect the superorganism metaphor will come to permeate and enrich the biological, social, and information sciences. For this to happen, it will be necessary to first understand the basic functioning of an ant colony in the same way a physician understands a human body: its metabolism and mass, its anatomy and internal integration, its growth and development, its ability to reproduce, its responsiveness to stimuli, its physiological stability and self-repair mechanisms, its capacity to distinguish self from other, and its ability to move and explore, achieve goals, glean nutrients, communicate with others, and adapt to a changing world.
A few months after seeing the Argentine ant battlefield with David Holway in San Diego, Melissa and I decided to pursue a more exotic adventure. In January 2008 we joined a research team on Easter Island led by John Loret, director of the Science Museum of Long Island. John, who at eighty still has the muscular physique of Popeye, first traveled to Easter Island in the 1950s with Thor Heyerdahl, famous for his journeys on the raft Kon-Tiki. He was going back now to explore caves and, with my assistance, to look for invasive ants.
Remote islands seldom harbor native ant species because ants are not skilled at crossing oceans without human help. When Ed Wilson studied the ants of Easter Island in 1973, the only species on record had been brought by commerce, and the Argentine ant was not among those found.41 Thirty-five years later, Argentine ants had swept the island, transforming it into one wide ant hill. Melissa and I collected workers from half a dozen localities and deposited them among their sisters elsewhere, from the sleepy village of Hanga Roa to a stone wall near Mahatua to the giant moai heads of Akahanga. Everywhere the ants mixed blissfully. The entire island proved to be a single supercolony—the product, we assumed, of one introduction by ship from mainland Chile.
Melissa had another reason for traveling with me to Easter Island. With the help of a former governor of the island, the archeologist Sergio Rapu, we had arranged to be married at the edge of the Rano Kao volcano. It was an ancient ceremony, one that had not been conducted on the island for several decades. Rapa Nui tribesmen in loincloths brought us to the precipice, stripped us naked, then clothed and painted us in beaten bark, feathers, and shells. As the winds threatened to tear off these scant garments, we exchanged marital rocks selected from the volcano rim. We took our vows in a ceremony of beating drums and shouted chants that hadn’t changed in centuries. At least one thing had changed, however. I looked down at one point and saw Argentine ants racing across my toes.
Experiencing untouched nature is all but impossible now. From the depths of the oceans to the farthest reaches of the atmosphere, there is no corner of the planet that humans have not explored, no place that has not been altered by our presence. Neither is there any corner of the globe that the ant cannot invade. Consider Biosphere 2, a $200 million, eight-story structure erected in the Sonoran desert of Arizona to demonstrate the power of technology over nature. Sealed off from the surrounding environment in 1991, Biosphere 2 was intended to be a closed ecological system, from which people would learn how to be self-sufficient in outer space. But a colony of Paratrechina longicornis, an invasive species from the Old World known as the crazy ant for its mad zigzag dashes, somehow found a way inside the otherwise impregnable glass-and-steel bubble.
Crazy ants hijacked this attempt to create an ecological utopia. By the time the project closed down three years later, they were everywhere. According to a contemporary press report, “Swarms of them crawled over everything in sight: thick foliage, damp pathways littered with dead leaves, and even a bearded ecologist in the humid rain forest.”42 To greater effect than intended, the project builders had created a microcosm of the Earth, complete with the human-induced traumas and foibles our planet faces—including the ants that hitch rides with us wherever we go.
Like it or not, ants and humans are in this together.