The raging combatants form a blur on all sides. the scale of the violence is almost incomprehensible, the battle stretching beyond my field of view. Tens of thousands sweep ahead with a suicidal single-mindedness. Utterly devoted to duty, the fighters never retreat from a confrontation—even in the face of certain death. The engagements are brief and brutal. Suddenly, three foot soldiers grab an enemy and hold it in place until one of the bigger warriors advances and cleaves the captive’s body, leaving it smashed and oozing.

I back off with my camera, gasping in the humid air of the Malaysian rain forest, and remind myself that the rivals are ants, not humans. I have spent months documenting such deaths through a field camera that I use as a microscope, yet I still find it easy to forget that I am watching tiny insects—in this case, a species known as Pheidologeton diversus, the marauder ant.

6 Comments

1. 1. poihths 09:38 PM 12/23/11

   In the print version of the article, the author writes: "The violent expansions of ant supercolonies bring to mind how human colonial superpowers once eradicated smaller groups, from Native Americans to Australian Aborigines." "To eradicate" has a very specific, well-known and well-understood meaning, which the OED defines as "to remove entirely, extirpate, get rid of." If I were a Native American or an Australian Aborigine, how should I react to anyone that can so blithely assume that my people no longer exist?

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2. 2. engineer.sci 01:57 AM 1/9/12

   Human-like in tactics perhaps, but motivationally -- where is their consciousness really?
   
   It would seem that the reality is actually more along the lines of the quasi-character Aunt Hillary, in "Ant Fugue" from Douglas Hofstadter classic Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
   
   Anteater claims to spend many happy hours in conversation with Aunt Hillary -- who is an ant colony, even though the ants themselves simply run around in instinctive panic when the Anteater comes near them.
   
   Now, certainly an ant colony is not advanced enough to be considered a corporate entity. However, the ants themselves are a bit too all-for-the-colony to really be considered exactly independent creatures either.
   
   And one wonders, on a consciousness level, might one imagine an evolution out of the little nerve ganglion of more robot than mind of the individual ant -- towards the much greater person of Aunt Hillary?
   
   What if human beings displayed a fierce love for each other that overcame hatred and warlike tendencies towards other groups? What if we -- altogether could become, relative to our human level, "Aunt Hillary?" What would it be like to leave our hopeless toil and chaos, soico-economic and politico-climatic problems, and arise to a new level to which these posed no serious challenge anymore? A peace and advancement in a sense of greatness of being as we have never known?
   
   Is there a secret of an evolutionary destiny, already sensed and enshrined within the cultural framework of religion? Towards what ultimate end?
   
   Perhaps a little real "Love thy fellow as thyself" to find out, wouldn't hurt?
   
   

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3. 3. lajksdgbiu in reply to poihths 07:56 AM 1/9/12

   The article could easily be read as saying "...smaller groups, that is to say tribes, of Native Americans and Australian Aborigines were eradicated", as doubtless some were. The "smaller groups" bit wouldn't really make sense in referring to Native Americans at large, seeing as their population at the time of contact with the West is estimated to have been some 60 million people.

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4. 4. crdcalusa in reply to engineer.sci 02:57 AM 1/10/12

   I see what you're getting at and I agree. I don't see any resemblance to human wars. The ants are responding instinctively to a real threat of starvation whereas, humans engage in conquests for greed not necessarily survival. Humans are motivated by individual visions of superiority and the power felt by subjugating the wills of others. If we had the singular focus of protecting our fellow societal members and behaved in such a way that we protected and nourished the collective such as ants do, then we'd at least attain the level of functioning that would allow our species to thrive and develop.

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5. 5. Michael M 04:55 PM 1/15/12

   War may well be the social response to saturated populations.
   Many human attributes of which we are more proud may be older: with a seemingly endless world for dispersal, we may have welcomed interaction with strangers.
   
   Other social species have divergent responses to strangers dependent upon whether their usable territory is limited by others of their species, or bounded by available open niche. I don't mention the species here, as humans imagine themselves in competition with the most outstanding social species I've studied, and have treated them with attempts at extermination.
   
   Humans may have achieved the maximum workable population without war as long as 50,000 years ago; there are some indicators from evidence of the arising of sedentary activities not found earlier in paleontological record.
   War itself did not seem to be as serious an undertaking before groups larger than tribal size occurred. The advent of agriculture may have introduced a predatory class which may have then developed the wisdom of protecting some harvestors for year-round sustenance.
   Another factor in high-attrition warfare has certainly been projectile weapons.
   Information on all these subjects is available in the anthropological literature.
   
   A species evolved for obligate defense/warfare, as are ants with their epigenetic or genetic warrior class is yet different from us, but for how long?
   
   Postscript:
   Population saturation happened in different eras on various continents; some human behavioral variation may be entrenched by long exposure to this saturation.
   Saturation can happen quickly with fertile response and technology - the baselines experienced by those alive today may also be changing behavior beyond previous resource-use saturation.
   
   Do not expect that peace can be achieved in a worldwide environment far oversaturated for a species still only able to resolve differences peacefully in groups of under 150 or so.
   Cognitive attributes of social stereotyping and generalizing to inhumane levels may be environmental adaptations to this limit.
   
   Most of our (modern homo sapiens) evolution happened in that endless world of dispersal for well over 100 to 150 thousand years of tiny populations, and release into the other continents from Africa.
   
   To repeat, some of the best in us may be the oldest impulses:
   We still see, for instance, among the fierce Pashtun, the ancient hospitality toward strangers, although rather hidden by 150 years of invasive war and the internecine tribal conflict that has gone on in that area for perhaps millennia.

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6. 6. Colin den Ronden 04:03 AM 5/22/12

   There is a universal phenomenon that happens with evolution; Species are either competitive (nomadic) or co-operative (social). The multicelled organism, like the jellyfish, is an advance on the single-celled animal. But though those social creatures may be co-operative with their own kind, it does not stop them being competitive with other species (or even separate units of the same species). So where is evolution leading us? Think of each person as being analogous to a cell, and the nation as an organism (criminals are akin to cancer). And ultimately the nations as cells, and a united Earth as an organism. Evolution aims for perfection, but when it reaches it at a certain level, it then has to make a quantum jump to a new level and start all over again. If you don't make the jump (like the cockroach), at least you serve a useful purpose as fodder for those that do.

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