Thinking About Ants

One of the nifty facts about the natural world that I like to share with the young people I (used to) see regularly is this: the biomass of humans is equal to the biomass of ants. The young people usually nod like they understand, but they mostly don't, so I enjoy my clarifications probably too much.

What that means, I say, is that if you put every human on Earth onto one side of a scale, and every ant on Earth onto the other side, they'd essentially be balanced. Oh, wow, they say.

What that also means is that, basically, there's a writhing pile of ants that's the same size as you crawling around out there somewhere.

And that get's their attention. Eyes wide, brain processing the information into horror film scenes I imagine...

But then I had an epiphany, a thinking breakthrough about ants in general, a realization that we've been thinking about them incorrectly for...ever?

I was watching a nature program with Cass or Corrie that focused on ants for a time, about how the drone/workers were out collecting food for the larvae back in the  nest. It was a petty regular activity for ants in general today, as there are very few (if any) non-super-social ants any more. The program's host made it a point to mention it's interesting that ants generally use their own energy to gather food for larvae that are not their own descendants, and this is rare in the animal world. 

We can all probably think of some examples, but really, we could exhaust that list pretty soon.

But these ants are gathering food for what amounts to their siblings. And, in a strange bit of dark irony, the larvae they are gathering food for will one day be gathering food for larvae that will one day grow to gather food for...and you get the picture. The majority of an ant colony are workers gathering food for larvae.

Some of the specimens will be soldiers, or other specialized workers, and even a new queen will be born...hatched...? The new queen will mature and eventually leave the nest, fly away to find a male, get impregnated and will found a new colony.

So...what?

My epiphany came during the program. We shouldn't focus on the oddity of the workers gathering food for larvae that aren't theirs, we need to focus on the many facets of the living organism of the Ant. 

But really: any single ant is essentially a body part of the queen, and Ants are, with the capital letter, in general, the expression of the will of the colony's queen. And that's a simple edict: get food.

The story of ants, or Ants, is the story of a queen and the nature of her autonomous limbs; the expression of Platonic Ant-dom is just a single queen. 

Do you have ants in your house? No...you have an infiltration of autonomous limbs of a queen ant. That's the proper view, that's the epiphany. That's the contextualized view of a specific and complex life form.

The real question may now be: How does this contextualized view of Ants affect our view and understanding of humanity?